Days before its closure, Stadia has released its ‘humble’ test game

videogameschronicle.com:

Days before the service closes for good, Google Stadia has released one final game which represents a piece of its history.

Worm Game was added to the service on Friday. The simple, Snake-like title was used to test Stadia’s cloud features before it launched in 2019, according to Google.

“Play the game that came to Stadia before Stadia came to the world,” it said. “Worm Game is a humble title we used to test many of Stadia’s features, starting well before our 2019 public launch, right through 2022.

“It won’t win Game of the Year, but the Stadia team spent a LOT of time playing it, and we thought we’d share it with you. Thanks for playing, and for everything.”

Google announced last year that the game streaming service will be shut down on January 18, 2023, when players will lose access to their game library.

At the time, it also confirmed that it intended to refund all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia store.

Announcing the Stadia closure plans in September, platform general manager Phil Harrison admitted that the service hadn’t gained the traction with users that Google expected following its November 2019 launch.

According to Google, the underlying technology platform that powers Stadia will be used across other parts of the company like YouTube, Google Play, and its Augmented Reality (AR) efforts.