Rockstar Gives a Helping Hand to Stranded Stadia Players

With the recent announcement of the end of Google’s Stadia platform, many gamers have been left wondering where the progress of their favourite games would go. Google has stated that this will be up to the individual developers themselves. Essentially, the company wants to get off of the rapidly sinking Stadia ship as quickly as possible, and it wants studios to deal with their own playerbases as a result.

One such studio is Rockstar Games- who heard the outcry from Red Dead Redemption fans on Twitter and decided on a quick solution to this issue. More specifically, with the Red Dead Online Stadia fanbase facing a complete data wipe (essentially forcing them to start over from scratch with another console), Rockstar’s customer support laid out a statement that was shared by Twitter user @ItsColourTV:

Of course, this is excellent news for many Red Dead Online players (especially one who put in over 6000 hours). It is important to note that this applies only to ‘active’ players. This means that you have to play within the final 30 days of Stadia’s life (so, between December 19th- January 18th) or this data will not carry over. Regardless, this is still a great option to have for many who feared that all of their saves would be lost. However, this does leave a huge question mark over other games on the service.

With Stadia’s shutdown date on January 18th quickly approaching, developers and fans are running out of time to be able to transfer their data to PC or other consoles- providing that’s even possible for some of these games. Once that date rolls around, any saved data (no matter how large) will be lost forever. In this context, it’s easy to see why so many are frustrated with Google’s haphazard handling out of the service. With no obvious assistance from the tech conglomerate itself, some developers are being left out in the rain.

This isn’t even mentioning the fiasco that saw those developing for Stadia finding out about its demise at the same time as everyone else. Similarly to G4, this is becoming a trend in the gaming industry that is actively harming studios and employees alike. Even if you argue that everyone should have seen Stadia’s doom coming, the lack of communication from Google remains disappointing. Combined with the save data fiasco, it’s become clear that Stadia will be remembered in the history books as Google’s failed venture into gaming.