Google's Stadia Games and Entertainment division reportedly once scrapped plans for a platform-exclusive follow-up to Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding.
According to a report by 9to5Google's Kyle Bradshaw, the proposed game was planned to be a single-player experience — a factor that seemingly motivated Stadia general manager Phil Harrison to cancel it as the company believed there was "no longer a market for solo experiences."
"Where Death Stranding was an asynchronous multiplayer game," Bradshaw's report reads, "where actions taken in your world can have an effect on other players, such as building signs to help others find their way — the proposed game would be strictly a single-player experience.
"Reportedly, the game had gotten initial approval from Google and had begun the early stages of development. However, shortly after the first mockups were shown in mid 2020, Google scrapped the project entirely."
In February 2021, Google officially shut down its internal game development studios and refocused on third-party developers Peloton, Capcom and Bungie.
That month, a report from VGC mentioned that Stadia Games and Entertainment turned down a proposal in 2020 for an episodic horror game from Kojima Productions, which was "keen to innovate in the cloud gaming space."
A Google Stadia spokesperson denied the report at the time, claiming it did not "have anything, nor have announced anything, with Kojima" and that the company's reps "talk to partners all the time in situations that don’t result in a project or even a proposal."
On Thursday, Google announced it will be shutting down the Stadia service entirely. By mid-January 2023, Google expects to have refunded the majority of Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, and game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia store.
This article was originally published on dbltap as Google Reportedly Passed Up a Stadia-Exclusive Death Stranding Title.
