Unless you’ve been avoiding social media all weekend, you’ve probably heard about Elden Ring, FromSoftware’s latest game. Maybe seen a couple screenshots, a clip of a particularly intense boss battle, or just people on Twitter talking about item discoveries, secrets around the map, or anything else. It’s a huge game that’s garnering near perfect reviews across the web. It’s really good, and everybody’s into it right now. There’s a ton of hype.
But you know who’s not hyped for Elden Ring? Google Stadia players.
This will arguably be FromSoftware’s biggest game ever, in terms of sales and playerbase. Everybody’s getting in on it, even people that haven’t played Dark Souls or any other games from the developer, for better or worse. It’s a very difficult game, but it’s bringing in tons of fresh blood because it legitimately is just that good.
But it’s not all perfect. There are some nitpicks over performance in the console versions of the game, with unsteady frame rates and dips, and PC players are having a very mixed bag of stuttering, crashing, and other issues. Even with those problems, the player count on Steam peaked at over 800k players and is sitting at over 600k while I write this article.
PC isn’t even FromSoftware’s biggest platform, with marketing and exclusive deals with Sony and using the PlayStation as a target platform. There’s just that much hype for the game that everybody’s getting in on this launch, except Google and Stadia players.
With the shaky performance that nearly everyone is experiencing, Elden Ring on Stadia would’ve been a smash success. Stadia has Sekiro on its storefront, which is another FromSoftware game that was developed alongside Elden Ring, so it’s not like the two companies haven’t worked together previously, and Google’s powerful cloud hardware would’ve been able to capture much of that PC hype without all of the bugs and problems that have dragged the game’s Steam rating down to MixedE.
Stadia is capable, which we’ve seen from the likes of Cyberpunk 2077, and if it’s got low enough latency to handle Sekiro it can certainly handle Elden Ring. So what happened? Why did Google see this massive game on the horizon and just let it pass by, forcing users on its platform to buy it somewhere else and missing the opportunity to bring disgruntled PC players and original Xbox One and PlayStation 4 users in for a test drive? It’s even a heavily asynchronous multiplayer kind of game, which is ideal for what Stadia does best.
Sure, there could be some quiet deal to bring Elden Ring to Stadia at some point in the future. It would run well, but the hype train has long left the station, and the buzz surrounding a July 2023 launch won’t be a fraction of what it is right now.
FromSoftware tossed a softball at Google, and they didn’t even take a swing at it.
