According to a report, The Quarry and High On Life were almost Stadia games
Both would have been “signature Stadia releases”.
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According toAxios Gaming newslettersources, both recently released horror gameThe Quarryand the upcoming FPS from Justin Roiland’s Squanch GamesHigh On Lifewere initially being developed with Google’s assistance, and intended to launch on Stadia. Until Google shifted its focus away from game development, that is.
In February of 2021,Google announced the closure of its internal Stadia game development studios. ThenStadia’s VP and product head left, as didseveral members of the Stadia Games and Entertainment team. What had been promoted as a platform with exclusive features only Stadia games would be able to make use of, like the wayPixeljunk Raiders used the service’s ‘play inside shared screenshots’ feature, became another technology Google could license so other companies can make better use of it.
The Quarry’s developerSupermassive Games was announced as a Stadia partnerin 2020, with Supermassive CEO Pete Samuels quoted as saying, “What the team is creating looks amazing and we can’t wait for people to get a glimpse of it later this year.” Nothing further followed, and when The Quarry was announced in March, 2K Games was its publisher. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s a raft of games out there that began with Google money behind them before having to find backing elsewhere to make it to release.
Stadia still has some exclusive games, including Gylt, Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle, and Hello Neighbour spin-off Hello Engineer. Others had exclusivity periods that have now ended, like the narrative platformer written by Rhianna PratchettLost Words: Beyond the Page, andOrcs Must Die! 3.
Perhaps the best thing we can hope to come out of Stadia is its tech being used to stream demos, as with theResident Evil Village demo you can play in your browser. Remember whenBastion’s prologue was available as a Chrome appall the way back in 2011? We’ve basically come full circle.
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Jody’s first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia’s first radio show about videogames,Zed Games. He’s written forRock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue,GamesRadar,Zam,Glixel,Five Out of Ten Magazine, andPlayboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody’s first article for PC Gamer was about theaudio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he’s written aboutwhy Silent Hill belongs on PC,why Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, andhow weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.
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