The games actually available with Stadia on launch day are fewer than expected

We’re coming down the home stretch, now. In just about one week from today, Stadia will be officially upon us and ready for launch. We’ve been excited by its impending arrival for months and the lineup of games has only grown over that same time. As it turns out, however, the games that have been announced for Stadia aren’t all going to be there at the starting line.

If you look back on all the news, announcements, and Stadia Connect events, you’ll notice none of them tied a specific date to any game launches. Instead, they said things like ‘coming to Stadia’ or ‘coming in 2019.’ Though a tad misleading, Google didn’t put itself on the hook with hard dates for the games themselves, and now that we’re almost ready to start leveraging the streaming game platform, we’re seeing that the promised titles will be pretty limited on launch day. Here they are:

• Assasin’s Creed Odyssey
• Destiny 2: The Collection
• GYLT
• Just Dance 2020
• Kine
• Mortal Kombat 11
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Thumper
• Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition | Rise of the Tomb Raider | Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Samurai Shodown

Buy the Pixelbook Go From Amazon

Don’t get me wrong, there are some good games on offer, but there are titles I suppose I ignorantly expected to be buying next week when Stadia officially launches. To be fair, most of the announced games will arrive later in 2019 and we’re only about 6 weeks away from this year being fully over with, so the game lineup will grow quite quickly. We’ll launch with 10 games and be at least to 24 games by December’s end. Somewhat glaringly absent from the full lineup for 2019 is CyberPunk 2077, Watchdogs: Legion, and Doom: Eternal.

My hope is Google gets aggressive with game roll-outs by February of 2020 when Stadia Base launches. That free service will attract a ton of casual gamers and will be that much more interesting if there are 40-50 titles to choose from. If you ask me, I’d rather games only launch on Stadia when they are ready and able to fully leverage the platform. Anything less will only mar the overall experience, and with a platform as cutting-edge as this, Google and Stadia need to keep things buttoned up for sure.

SOURCE: The Keyword