Google Stadia launch game lineup revealed, looks great if you want old games

Red Dead Redemption 2
Can I Run It?

Add FPS
Compare GPU
Trailers

Red Dead Redemption 2
Have your say

User Review

8.45

Optimisation

Most Demanding

100+

Low vs Ultra Screenshots

Editorial

With but a week to go until Google Stadia’s launch, Google has finally seen fit to unveil the launch line-up of games. It’s a little threadbare, in truth. Certainly not short on quality but definitely coming up empty in terms of the breadth of experiences and the number of titles which we haven’t played to death already.

A grand total of 12 games will be ready for Stadia’s launch according to Google, although even this figure may be wrong. Seriously, the messaging around Stadia is a mess, and it’s particularly worrying when the first units are shipping out any day now and we don’t even know how much of the games are going to cost.

Here are the dozen games ready for Stadia’s launch, along with their original release year:

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (2018) Destiny 2 (2017) GYLT (Exclusive) Just Dance 2020 (2019) Kine (2019) Mortal Kombat 11 (2019) Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) Rise of the Tomb Raider (2015) Samurai Shodown (2019) Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition (2018) Thumper (2016) Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition (2013)

Just a single exclusive and a bunch of games which are more than a year old. It’s not the sort of line-up which screams ‘run out and buy Stadia’. Still, there may be one or two other surprises along the way though, with Sports Interactive claiming Football Manager 2020 is still a Stadia launch title despite being overlooked by Google.

The following games will also launch between now and the end of the year:

Attack on Titan 2: Final Battle (2019) Borderlands 3 (2019) Darksiders Genesis (2019) Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 (2016) Farming Simulator 19 (2018) Final Fantasy 15 (2016) Football Manager 2020 (2019) Ghost Recon Breakpoint (2019) Grid (2019) Metro Exodus (2019) NBA 2K20 (2019) Rage 2 (2019) Trials Rising (2019) Wolfenstein: Youngblood (2019)

That right there is one hell of an uphill battle. Google hasn’t released pricing details for any of these games but, assuming they’re full priced, $60 product, these games are going to be a real tough sell when they can already be bought for cheaper elsewhere. Again, there are some great games in this line-up but there’s nothing particularly fresh or exciting which helps Stadia stand apart from the crowd, or really shows off the USP of high performance cloud gaming.