On January 18th 2023, a lot of people will lose their preferred way of playing games. At the same time, they will lose access to their favorite titles.
Thankfully, helpful Stadia community member and data visualizer, @in7ead, has your backs. With some extra time on his hands now that there is no Stadia database to update, Inlead (as the above Twitter handle is pronounced) has turned his skilled hand to making an interactive dashboard to keep track on which cloud service your favorite game is available on.
At the time of writing the cheat sheet is missing a couple of viable services, mainly Boosteroid and Blacknut. But from his reckoning only 13 games (4% of Stadia’s 304 game library) are not currently available to play on any cloud services.
Given that 5 of those titles were only available on Stadia (Pac Man Mega Tunnel Battle, Gylt, PixelJunk Raiders, Outcasters, and Hello Engineer) that isn’t too bad going.
There are quite a number of caveats to this however. Importantly, Stadians may find that these services are not all equivalent.
The reason most games are available on Shadow is that the service is essentially a virtual Windows PC in the cloud where you can install any game launcher and game you like. It’s got great flexibility but also comes with the need to manage your disk space, perform game updates and launch games via a Windows desktop interface.
The PlayStation Plus cloud service is unfortunately only available to use on PlayStation consoles and Windows PCs – it doesn’t support TVs, Phones, Tablets, Macs, Chromebooks etc.
Luna could be a good bet if you are an Ubisoft+ subscriber. However, other Luna channels have rotating libraries of games with one of the Stadia games listed already set to rollout before January 18 (Chorus). The service also doesn’t support basic multiplayer, friends lists or platform features like achievements, leaderboards etc. that Stadians have gotten used to outside of the Ubisoft channel.
We generally think here that most Stadians will feel most comfortable moving to GeForce Now and Xbox Game Pass – assuming the ability to play your purchased games does indeed come in the next couple months to Xbox Cloud Gaming which could dramatically increase the green column.
Ultimately though, at this stage, it looks like if you want to play as much of your Stadia library as possible post January 18th, you may have to subscribe to more than one platform.
Thank you for your reliable and consistent work Inlead. Folks can also check out our list of games across all cloud services here.
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