It turns out that Stadia Games and Entertainment turned down the opportunity to have an exclusive follow-up to Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding.
How did this happen?
A year after Stadia launched, Google began “wiping out” the Stadia Games and Entertainment division. Before that shutdown, Google worked with quite a few well-known developers in the gaming industry; initially, the idea was to start crafting Stadia-exclusive titles.
Some companies, such as Harmonix, publicly confirmed working on Stadia titles. Other names like Yu Suzuki and Hideo Kojima were also reported. These names were allegedly part of the second-party titles that would be published by Stadia Games & Entertainment.
According to 9to5Google, the game Kojima was working on was meant to be a Stadia-exclusive follow-up to Death Stranding, initially launched as a PlayStation exclusive in 2019. As we know, Death Stranding is an asynchronous multiplayer game; but the proposed game would be strictly a single-player experience.
It turns out that the source stated the single-player nature of the game led Google to cancel Stadia’s collaboration with Kojima. The reason? Apparently, there was no longer a market for solo experiences. The game had gotten initial approval from Google and had begun the early stages of development. However, shortly after the development team showed the first mockups in 2020, Google scrapped the project. It was said that Stadia’s General Manager, Phil Harrison, was the one who ultimately made the final call to cancel the Death Stranding follow-up.
At this point, it’s difficult to know if an exclusive game from Hideo Kojima would have made a difference for Stadia’s future. According to Kojima, Death Stranding entered development in 2015 and didn’t launch until 2019. If the follow-up required a similar timescale, it wouldn’t have even seen release before Google pulled the plug on Stadia.
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