Stadia's Death Has Fans Scrambling To Save Their Games

The sun is setting on Google Stadia. As detailed in a message from Stadia Vice President and General Manager Phil Harrison, the service will shut down on January 18, 2023. Players only had a short time with Google Stadia, which launched in November 2019. During that brief period, Stadia brought big titles, such as "Destiny 2," "Red Dead Redemption 2," and "Assassin's Creed Odyssey," to the cloud, along with exclusives like "Pixeljunk Raiders," "Outcasters," and "Hello Engineer."

It remains unclear what will happen to its exclusives once Stadia closes down, and the same is true of Stadia save files. Harrison's message to players included a promise that everyone who purchased Stadia games or hardware would receive full refunds, but that may not be enough for those who have spent hundreds of hours within certain titles. While individuals may be able to use a workaround to save their single-player campaign progress, live-service gamers could be out of luck.

For Twitter user ItsColourTv, thousands of hours of Stadia playtime hang in the balance. In a tweet, ItsColourTv showed that they've spent 5,907 hours within "Red Dead Redemption 2." ItsColourTv further clarified that the majority of this playtime came from "Red Dead Online." A self-proclaimed "Red Dead Online" millionaire, their character and extensive in-game resources remain on the line.

ItsColourTv isn't excited about the prospect of losing all of that invested time. Appealing to the game's developers, ItsColourTv said, "@RockstarGames please let us do a one-time character transfer I am begging you." At the time of this writing, Rockstar had yet to respond to the request. At least one player proved sympathetic to ItsColourTv's plight, though the possible solution they offered won't save their "RDR Online" progress.

Players on Reddit have expressed similar worries over their save files. DeskPixel posted to the Stadia subreddit with concerns about their "Cyberpunk 2077" progress: "can CD Projekt Red PLEASE make cloud saving available for stadia as well? I [care] more about my save game than a game refund." Plenty of other users have done their best to suggest possible workarounds such as downloading the files with Google Takeout before transferring them into Steam. However, multiple people have reported potential issues with this method.

The death of Stadia will shake up the industry for many gamers. It remains to be seen whether Google or the studios behind Stadia's titles will offer a solution for preserving save files.