If you haven’t heard, Google Stadia is closing and store closing next week. But before the never-very-successful game-streaming service dies, it’s provided a little (and free) gift that you can only play for a few days before everything goes offline.
Released in 2019, Google Stadia was a massive and expensive investment by Google into the world of gaming. With cloud technology aka a bunch of servers and external computers, Stadia’s big promise was instant play on the go. No more upgrades or expensive consoles. And although sometimes it worked, the high cost of the games, the lack of features, the small library and the costs of the Internet ended up dooming the service. Of course, some superfans logged thousands of hours on itbut for most, it just wasn’t what they wanted or needed from a gaming platform.
So it was not surprising that in September of last year, Google announced the end of Stadia. In five days, on January 18, the video game streaming service will be shut down. With the end so close, it seemed unlikely that Stadia would receive any new game releases. However, Google has published one last game. But don’t expect a great RPG or open world remake. Instead, the latest Stadia game is game of wormsan in-house developed title that was used to test Stadia long before it went public.
We probably should never have seen or played this Snake-like test game, as it has rather rudimentary graphics and rather ugly menus. But in the last days of Stadia, it seems that the developers working on the project were able to give their community one last gift. Even better, anyone can play game of worms since it is free. (Which makes sense considering the Stadia Store has stopped working.)
The game’s store page features this nice and touching description of the game and what it was used for:
Play the game that came to Stadia before Stadia came to the world. “Worm Game” is a humble title that we use to test many of Stadia’s features, from long before our public release in 2019, through 2022. It won’t win Game of the Year, but the Stadia team spent a LOT of time playing it. , and we thought we would share it with you. Thanks for playing and for everything.
Is game of worms something incredibly important or surprising? Not really. However, it’s still great to take a look behind the scenes and, thanks to videos from game of wormsthis little piece of trial software will be around for a bit for people to look back on a few years from now.
In other great End Of Stadia news, Google has confirmed that starting next week, it will start allowing players to unlock the Bluetooth functionally of your Stadia controller.
This is a nice way to make the controller, which has one of my favorite modern D-pads on it, more useful and easier to connect to more devices. I doubt the developers who worked on Stadia for years planned for the controller to be the only thing left of Stadia in 2023, but here we are.
