Amplitude Studios’ upcoming strategy game, Humankind, will be the first Stadia release to feature a new touch-focused control scheme when it comes out on August 17th, according to 9to5Google and confirmed to The Verge by Google. “Direct touch” is designed around multitouch finger inputs like a traditional mobile game, rather than the previous way you may have played Stadia on your phone, with a Bluetooth controller or gamepad overlay.
The screenshots Google shared give a pretty good idea of how playing with direct touch works in Humankind. A single finger tap selects in-game objects, holding a finger down previews content, two fingers cancel, dragging your fingering around moves your view in-game, and three fingers brings up the pause menu.
The touch controls for Humankind with direct touch enabled.Image: Google
The game will also feature Stadia’s State Share feature, which allows a friend to pick up where you left off in a game just by sharing a screenshot or video clip with them. In the case of Humankind, that also allows you to use a feature called “Leave Your Mark” where you let your friend play through your same world, find the ruins of your civilization, and compare their achievements to yours as they play.
Stadia’s state share feature with Humankind’s “Leave Your Mark” twist will allow friends to play through each other’s worlds and interact with each other’s achievements. Image: Google
Using direct touch rather than a controller for a 4X turn-based strategy game like Humankind makes sense, if only because offering satisfying controller support is difficult. Strategy games require navigating complicated menus and being precise where you deploy troops or build structures. You can translate a mouse to a controller stick, but you’ll lack some of the finesse you could have had otherwise. That’s why good console-specific releases of strategy franchises like Civilization Revolution are so beloved: they strip down a game to its core elements and simplify things so they work with a controller or touch.
Stadia’s in-app prompt to enable direct touch.Image: Google
Touch controls do come with a potential extra challenge for a streaming games service like Stadia — potential latency issues. With touch, you might expect even more immediate responses to your taps than with a controller, which isn’t always possible with slower connections. When asked, Google did not share if it’s had to make any adjusts to accommodate latency with direct touch.
Direct touch was originally spotted by 9to5Google earlier this year in an update to the Stadia app on Android, and it still isn’t entirely clear what implementing the input method entails. Google says that Humankind’s use of direct touch is custom and that the feature should make it easier to port games to Stadia while maintaining the same control schemes. Whether direct touch could help mobile-first titles come to Stadia remains to be seen, but it does mean that games should be a lot easier to play on your phone in the future.
Humankind is scheduled to be released on PC, Mac, and Stadia on August 17th, 2021.
In a horrible confluence of fates, comedy-adventure game Journey to the Savage Planet was released for Stadia on the same day that Google shuttered its internal development studios – including Journey to the Savage Planet developer, Typhoon Studios. That coincidence has left behind a nasty after-effect – the Stadia version of Journey to the Savage Planet contains a major bug, but no one seems to know who can fix it.First pointed out on Reddit by user lordubuntu, Stadia’s Journey to the Savage Planet launched with a nasty bug that causes freezes on the game’s start screen, which seems to be occurring for a number of players based on the replies. With no local files to look through on a Stadia game, players can’t work on fixes for themselves, meaning they have to turn to official support channels for help.
With Typhoon no longer in existence, the game’s developers can’t implement that fix. As lordubuntu found out, it seems that’s left both Google and Journey to the Savage Planet publisher 505 Games unsure who’s responsible. Google support responses sent to lordubuntu ask them to contact 505 – but 505 support messages indicate that the company no longer has control of the game code, and say only Google would be able to implement a fix.
On Reddit, a Stadia community manager has now said that Google is “actively working with our partners to identify a fix”, but offered no update on who’d be responsible for that happening, or if it was possible. We’ve contacted 505 and Google for comment.
The upshot is that some players have been left with a game they simply can’t access, and with no current timeline for a fix. This would usually be routine work for a newly-released game – and it must be deeply unpleasant to be an ex-Typhoon developer knowing that you’re unable to make your own hard work available to those who want to play it.
Google shuttered its internal Stadia studios at the beginning of February 2021, impacting 150 employees. It’s since promised that more than 100 third-party games will still arrive on the service this year. A class-action lawsuit has been filed against Google, Id Software, and Bungie for allegedly misleading customers on the platform’s ability to display games at a 4K resolution.
Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.
The suit cites the performance of Doom Eternal (pictured).Screenshot: id Software
There’s another gaming-focused class action lawsuit in the works, this one against Google Stadia over whether or not Stadia can run games at 4K resolution. The suit was originally filed in October, but had a development earlier this month when lawyers for co-defendants id Software filed a notice of removal with federal court.
As noted by PC Gamer, the suit alleges that Google, Bungie, and id Software misrepresented the capabilities of Stadia by saying that games like Destiny 2 and Doom Eternal could hit 4K resolution at 60 frames per second. Turns out, neithergame was playable in true 4K. The basis for the suit is that anyone who purchased the Google Stadia Founder’s Edition, the Google Stadia Premier Edition, or a monthly Google Stadia Pro Subscription did so with the intent of playing games at true 4K resolution, rather than playing upscaled versions of said games.
The suit was initially filed with the Supreme Court of New York, but lawyers for id Software filed to move to the Eastern District of New York, a federal court. Most civil suits—class action suits, in particular—take an enormous amount of time, often years, to work their way through the courts. Beyond that, the vast majority of classes settle, either as a class or on an individual basis.
Class action suits are also currently pending in federal courts against Sony, for PlayStation 5 controllers exhibiting “DualSense drift,” and CD Projekt Red, for those who lost money investing in CDPR prior to and following the troubled launch of Cyberpunk 2077.
It’s been a rough month for Google Stadia: On February 1 Stadia shut down all internal development studios, shifting focus instead to offer Stadia tech to video game publishers. Last week, Kotaku reported that Stadia leadership had praised those teams—comprising around 150 developers—just a week before laying them off. And then there’s Terraria: Andrew Spinks, a developer of the popular world-crafting game, canceled its Stadia port after he was reportedly locked out of his Google accounts.
In a new class-action lawsuit, Google is being sued for advertising that Stadia was more powerful than Sony’s Playstation and Microsoft’s Xbox by streaming in 4K when, in fact, few games took advantage of this quality when the service first became available. Instead, most games at launch streamed at 1080p. Despite this, Stadia’s management and marketing teams did nothing to update their campaign to reflect this. The lawsuit alleges that Google “greatly exaggerated the streaming quality and display resolution” and sought to juice up its subscriber numbers this way.
While Google did provide the capability to developers to deliver their games in 4K quality and 60 frames per second to consumers, many did not take advantage of it at launch. Basically, it’s possible that many gamers bought into Stadia on the promise of competitive console-quality 4K game streaming and were instead given something less than advertised. The marketing essentially misled consumers into thinking that all of its games were available in 4K – whoops!
If you want to see Google’s original commercial, you can watch it below. Besides being completely stupid and annoying, these commercials constantly hammered 4K and 60 FPS, and that Stadia is basically like… “electric air”. Instead, they should have been driving home the fact that gamers could play anywhere and on the hardware they already own. After learning the hard way that their target market was not hard-core gamers, they finally came around and began using this marketing, but not before the courts got involved and this lawsuit popped up, I guess.
What’s Stadia?
Stadia is only the newest, most logic-defying, mind-bending, absurd gaming platform on earth!
It’s basically “electric air”
The lawsuit, should it to to the courts, seeks to cover all people in the United States who purchased the Stadia Founder’s Edition, Premier Edition, and/or a subscription to Stadia Pro between June 6, 2019, and the date when the lawsuit resolves. There is currently no amount per user attached to the classaction.org coverage of this, but litigation like this takes time, so just keep an eye on the news. So far, you won’t need to “join” the lawsuit in order to receive reparations if you’re a part of the affected group.
Stadia’s leadership decisions
You know, I love Stadia conceptually and as a service, but Google seems to be doing everything in its power to end up in the news every week for something else. It’s a shame that the hard-working, passionate team of Stadia developers are doing everything in their power to make the service something world-class and revolutionary while the leadership team consistently makes decisions that negatively impact everyone around them.
I have no idea what’s going on at Google this year, but I’m starting to see a pattern – they create an awesome team of talented, creative people who want to bring an idea to life, and then hire someone into leadership who destroys it all. I know that may sound a bit harsh, but it’s true. These individuals seem to have bad industry track records, or just be out of touch with the community they’re serving in general. How does that even happen?
I want to make it clear that individuals like Grace “GracefromGoogle” Yang and others have publicly expressed their dismay at unwarranted hate and personal attacks when instead that anger from gamers should be directed towards those at the top who are oblivious to the rhythm and culture of the gaming community that she and her team have worked so hard at every single turn to capture and cultivate. Seriously, the Stadia community team exhibits the best customer service and most passion that I’ve ever seen in my entire lifeand the product they’ve built is incredible, but it’s being overshadowed by the company’s poor leadership decisions.
I’m all for criticism. Really I am. However, literally throwing something that my co-workers (and friends) have worked so hard on into the trash can for “likes” is beyond disrespectful. I would never wish that kind of feeling on anyone… not even my worst enemy.
— Grace Yang (@Grace_Yang_) February 13, 2021
I mean, they hired Phil Harrison, Google’s general manager, as the platform’s product manager. Sadly, he previously left both Sony and Microsoft among several other jobs not three years apart from each other. He may have been directly responsible for shuttering the first-party development studios out of fear in response to Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda. He or his leadership team also mismanaged resources and individuals before and during the pandemic – so much so that they told everyone on the Stadia Games and Entertainment team that they were doing a great job in an email a week prior to laying them all off, knowing that Google wouldn’t have fitting positions for game developers. I just don’t get it.
I just hope that however this lawsuit turns out, Google learns a lesson. Care more about your public image than your wallet, and care more about your people than your public image – both users and developers alike. Improving lives should go beyond providing an innovative product, it should mean putting your ethics over your desire for money first and foremost.
Grace and her team as well as those who were displaced with little to no warning when SG&E shuttered should receive the reparations they so badly deserve – perhaps through a second lawsuit. It’s disheartening to see how many people have uprooted their lives and gave their all to the cause only to be jobless or in a position that they could probably care less for. It’s absurd that the remaining developers must continue to swim upstream against a torrent of internal conflict, giving more than 100% and yet they continue to do so with a smile because they’re incredible people. As all of this unfolds on a weekly basis, they just want to create something transformative and fun for gamers who can appreciate it, and even for those who are consumed by misplaced vitriol.
As a Google “fanboy” and Stadia addict, it hurts me so badly to say this, but perhaps it would be better for all parties if Stadia were owned by any company other than Google. It deserves its own identity apart from the damaged reputation that Google has become known for and I hope more than anything that it gets to continue serving its fans and providing a disruptive experience.
Crayta’s timed Stadia exclusivity is coming to an end soon, with developer Unit 2 Games confirming that the title will be making its way to PC “very soon.” Originally announced as a “First on Stadia” timed exclusive, Crayta’s jump to other platforms was always more a question of “when” rather than “if,” but the announcement marks the first official indication of the regular PC port.
The news — originally spotted by 9to5Google, citing a tweet from Twitter user @Yogarine — comes from an announcement by Unit 2 Games in the game’s Discord chat. The company promises that it’ll have more information (including a launch date and the digital storefront where Crayta will be offered) in the coming weeks, but it does promise that it’s “still every bit as committed to Stadia as we’ve always been.” The new PC version will also offer full crossplay with the Stadia version of Crayta.
A Minecraft-style game creation game that’s built on Unreal Engine, Crayta’sstandout feature (aside from the rare status of a Stadia-exclusive title) was as one of the first games to adopt Stadia’s State Share technology, which (in theory) promised that any Stadia player could join a Crayta world simply by clicking on a link. It’s a feature that’ll likely stay exclusive to the Stadia version of the game even after the PC port launches, given its reliance on Google’s streaming tech to pull off.
