The Google Stadia team will add over 100 games to its cloud gaming service this year, a new post on its community blog has revealed. In the post, the team highlighted nine of the titles arriving on the service in the near future, including FIFA 21 (17 March) and detective/action RPG title Judgment (23 April) by the studio behind the Yakuza franchise.
Wayforward’s action platformers Shantae: Half-Genie Hero Ultimate Edition and Shantae: Risky’s Revenge – Director’s Cut will also be available to play on 23 February. Risky’s Revenge was originally released for the DSi in 2010, and the Director’s Cut with improved features first came out for Windows in 2014. Meanwhile, Half-Genie Hero Ultimate Edition is the belly-dancing Shantae’s first full HD adventure.
Triangle Studios’ It came from space and ate our brains is an arcade top-down shooter featuring brain-eating aliens invading Earth. It has a campaign mode that can accommodate up to four local players and will be available on 2 March. Kaze and the Wild Masks, a side-scroller featuring classic ’90s platformer elements and modern-looking pixel art graphics, is arriving on 26 March. The team has also highlighted three games without release dates yet, starting with strategic team platformer Killer Queen Black. Street Power Football, an arcade-style football game is also coming soon, as well as sci-fi action RPG Hellpoint.
Google Stadia boss Phil Harrison spoke about the decision to close their first-party efforts on the corporate blog as well.
“We launched Stadia with the goal of making your favourite games instantly available wherever you want to play them. With the recent successful launch of Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia, gameplay on all types of devices, including iOS, growing our slate of YouTube integrations, and our global expansions, it’s clear that Stadia’s technology has been proven and works at scale,” he told fans. “Having games streamed to any screen is the future of this industry, and we’ll continue to invest in Stadia and its underlying platform to provide the best cloud gaming experience for our partners and the gaming community. This has been the vision of Stadia since the beginning. In 2021, we’re expanding our efforts to help game developers and publishers take advantage of our platform technology and deliver games directly to their players. We see an important opportunity to work with partners seeking a gaming solution all built on Stadia’s advanced technical infrastructure and platform tools. We believe this is the best path to building Stadia into a long-term, sustainable business that helps grow the industry.”
Google, earlier this month, announced that it was shutting down its in-house game-development for Stadia, Stadia Games and Entertainment. The news cast a shadow as to what the future held for Google’s game streaming service. Now, days later the company has finally shed some light in this regard.