Well @Masterkicker, Google did at least say they release that game in 2019, so they still have 18 days (including today) to fulfill that promise. ![]()
@Chufu Well they said they "expect" rather than promise of guarantee.
Over the next six weeks, we also expect that Borderlands 3, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, Dragon Ball: Xenoverse 2 and Darksiders Genesis will be playable on Stadia.
So, it is still within the realms of possibility, although I dread to think of the backlash that would cause, a delay could be announced. Breakpoint is an interesting one, initially it was supposed to be 2020 IIRC, then November 2019, and now December 2019.
But all it takes is someone with enough courage/clout to pull the plug on a release for QA reasons, never a nice thing, but shipping with a howler can sometimes be worse. I've worked in s/w development for long enough to know that sometimes release date have to slip.
@Nilas :
It has its own API, different controller functionality, Crowd Play, Crowd Choice, Stream Connect, State Share, custom GPU etc. I don’t believe for one minute that a port is straight forward. If it was there would have been significantly more than 22 titles at launch IMHO.
Stadia uses a linux based O/S with Vulkan; Unity code has to be IL2CPP compatible, and I guess that there are a bunch of restrictions for the Unreal engine too, aside from being compatible with the appropriate engine version that supports the Stadia SDK.
Yeah, the more I think about it, the concept of a quick port just gets thrown out of the window IMHO.
Google themselves said porting would be easy. Still takes more than a day to do it and then check that everything is working.
@mcnichoj : I still don't see it being a straight forward task. Obviously depending on what the code is like to begin with, but custom rendering plugins and shaders will need to be rewritten to support Vulkan. Native O/S plugins will need to be compatible with a Linux O/S, and that doesn't cover engine differences or the new API calls.
I think that there is more marketing talk about “easy” vs “realistic”. Programmers typically don’t believe in easy ports, they’ve had their fingers burned too often with that kind of promise before.
I had a thoughts on this and more questions come to mind.
Since Uplay+ is coming to Stadia in 2020, which means all Ubisoft games playable through Stadia, how will they do that, if each game has to be ported separately ?
As I said I can understand there's some work for the stadia features, there's some work for the controller, settings and tests. But the port itself cannot require so much efforts.
So far developers needed to do with current limitations of each existing consoles and current hardware available on computers. On the other hand, Stadia is supposed to be evolutive and adapt to what's made by developpers.
I have a theory coming up then :
My understanding is that Google develops their evolutive OS to be compatible with everything. As soon they know a developer wants their games on Stadia, they check the engine used and they make their system compatible with it. It's work for Google but not for the developers. It could explain why there are not too many games offered yet, as the Google systems are still new, they didn't work on all different engines yet.
@Nilas : In short, UPLAY+ will arrive as a service on Stadia, but it won't have the same library of titles that you see on the PC equivalent. No different to what you see on XBox GamePass and the PC equivalent there isn't always a 1:1 correlation, and likewise the same situation that you see with EA's Orgin Access for XBox and PC there are differences.
So, will you see the same 114 titles currently available on UPLAY+ available on Stadia when it has the UPLAY+ service, I would say not. Could you imagine the amount of work and effort that it would take to port all these titles over and to test and QA them... reality check...it's just not going to happen, Ubisoft don't have the resources to tie up on all of that work without a massive hit on their existing development strategy. At least that is my belief.
I'm not expecting anytime soon that suddenly every PC game is just going to appear on Stadia, I expect that the games that make it over initially are those that are:
We are unlikely to see anything based on CRYENGINE until such time that Crytek release a compatible version of their Engine, and so far we have only heard of Unity and Unreal engine support for Stadia, so it could still be some time to go before we start seeing games running with other engines IMHO.
@Nilas I think @Mad_Dog_Bravo answered most of your points about Uplay+. I just wanted to add... I don't think it's going to be very difficult to port the games. The infrastructure is almost surely in place, that's how they ported AC Odyssey during the beta. Licensing deals with the publishers is going to be the difficult part. But the capability is already in place and has probably been being tweaked and perfected since the beta.
Also I'm not saying @Mad_Dog_Bravo is wrong. I just think that it's been a year since the beta ended and Ubisoft had been basically a partner in this since then. So there has been time to dedicate resources to the effort. I think it's obviously not done, but it's not as far from completion as we might think.
@Masterkicker just in case you missed it, Dragonball Xenoverse 2 is it now in the stadia store
Anyone else having trouble with no users in Dragonball Xenoverse 2