Google Stadia will shut down at 11:59 p.m. PST on Wednesday, which means that since it’s a cloud gaming service, its handful of exclusive games are about to become impossible play. Developers are marking the moment in their own way, like Q-Games shares concept art for his Stadia game Pixel Junk Raiders (and pitch it to other editors in the process).
Necrosoft Games, creator of the Stadia exclusive shooting sport, had other ideas. Thinking only of a way to preserve the game in some form (without, presumably, breaking the terms of its deal with Google), Necrosoft used some sort of backdoor to add shooting sport to the Steam version of its sequel, Hyper Gunsport.
Stadia is closing tomorrow. This means that all exclusives, like the original Gunsport, will be gone. But!! Since we care about the preservation of the game, we have made available an offline version of Gunsport in the Steam version of Hyper Gunsport, through the beta channel. pic.twitter.com/AeyR7fDBcs
– necrosoftgames (@necrosoftgames) January 17, 2023
Necrosoft brought Hyper Gunsport on Steam and consoles in December 2022, following Stadia’s exclusive release of the original in 2020. Now an offline-only version of shooting sport has been added to the Steam version of Hyper Gunsport in the beta branch, a function of Steam which is generally used to allow users to test pre-release versions of games.
Necrosoft said it made the move “because we care about game preservation…It’s offline and Stadia’s trappings have been taken down, but at least it exists!” Saluting the game’s Stadia players, the developer said, “We will always have that moment when we saw more concurrent players than Fate!!!!!!”
shooting sport and Hyper Gunsport are retro-futuristic sports games in the line of windbreaker, in which teams compete to launch a ball of energy into their opponent’s goal. “It’s cyberpunk volleyball with guns,” according to the Hyper Gunsportit is official description.
Stadia’s untimely demise shows how fleeting modern gaming can be, and the enormous challenge of preserving gaming in the current climate. We already live in a world where games move with the times, depend on server maintenance to run, and are sold as digital downloads, but with the advent of cloud gaming services like Stadia, there’s no not even a download, and the code only exists on remote servers that operate at the whim of the companies that operate them. Necrosoft’s move is little more than that, a move, but it’s smart, and a welcome attempt to stop one more game from vanishing into the ether.
