Google killed Stadia-exclusive follow-up to Death Stranding

We now know that Google is shutting its Stadia cloud gaming service on 18 January 2023, which many claim to have seen coming for a while. However, up until last year, there were huge plans that could have changed its fortunes.

For starters, it’s been revealed that Google was working closely with Hideo Kojima on a follow-up to Death Stranding. It would have been exclusive to Stadia too.

The original Death Stranding was a major coup for Sony, first released as a PlayStation 4-only title. It has since been released for PC, as well as hit PS5 in Director’s Cut form. But, according to a couple of reports, Kojima planned to make a single-player game in the same universe for the cloud platform.

It would have been episodic, it is said, and would have utilised some of the more uniques technologies offered by the cloud.

However, Google allegedly cancelled it as it felt there was no market for a single-player experience. Death Stranding had some multiplayer, shared-world aspects, which would have been Google’s preference too, it seems.

A source told 9to5Google that Stadia boss, Phil Harrison, made the final decision.

Maybe if he hadn’t, Stadia would have picked up a larger userbase and wouldn’t now be winding down. Guess we’ll never know.