According to 9to5 Google, Google reportedly cancelled a Stadia-exclusive follow-up to Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding game because it didn’t see a market for single-player games anymore.
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Hideo Kojima has a reputation for having a brilliant mind, and a bit of bad luck when it comes to games being cancelled. After being ousted from Konami after the original Silent Hill games, he created Kojima productions and rose back to his rightful place as one of the most creative game directors we have today. He shocked the gaming world a bit with Death Stranding and almost released a sequel before it was cancelled.
Hopefully, this is not the end for the Death Stranding franchise the way that P.T. was the end of the Silent Hill franchise.
Death Stranding Follow-Up
Kojima Productions was reported to have had a follow-up Death Stranding game with Google that was in early development. The game was meant to have been an exclusive title for Google Stadia, Google’s own game streaming platform. It was unknown if the game was meant to have been a sequel, prequel, or a spin-off from the original, but it was going to be a single-player game like the original.
Google greenlit the follow-up almost right after the publication of the first game, however, when the company was shown mock-ups of the game in 2020, it was decided by Stadia General Manager Phil Harrison that the Death Stranding spin-off needed to be cancelled.
It is believed that the game was cancelled because of its single-player nature, with the argument that the solo experience wouldn’t sell with their customers, as the single-player but asynchronous interaction was being carried over from the first game.
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Google Cancels Stadia
Stadia is Google’s own game streaming platform that was launched in 2019. While many people bought into the exclusive streaming platform, with so many in the market already, the service never really took off. It wasn’t long before Google started showing signs of its decline when it decided to shut down its first-party development studios last year. It was then announced that Stadia will be completely shut down on the 18th of January 2023. Hopefully, Google is planning to offer a refund to those who bought into the platform and spent money on games through them, although nothing has been confirmed yet.
Hideo Kojima is reportedly now working on a game with Microsoft, utilizing the company’s “cutting edge technology,” and their cloud services in particular for the game. Although the Google follow-up was officially cancelled in 2020, Norman Reedus had seemed to confirm a sequel for Death Stranding in development earlier this year.
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Death Stranding
Death Stranding was a game created by Kojima Productions and published in November 2019 by Sony Interactive Entertainment for the PS4, and then in July 2020 by 505 Games for Windows. The game is set in the US following a cataclysmic event which caused destructive creatures to begin roaming the Earth. We play as Sam Porter Bridges (Norman Reedus), who is a courier that travels between isolated colonies, bringing them supplies and reconnecting them to one another via a wireless communication network as a courier.
The award-winning Death Stranding is a single-player action sci-fi game that has collaborative and asynchronous multiplayer features like building bridges in your world that could show up in the world of other players, helping the community.
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