Google tells The Verge it has now patched Journey to the Savage Planet, one of the first and last games from one of Google’s own studios, after players discovered it had game-breaking bugs and that technical support was no help. It was originally unclear who might fix the game, since its developers had seemingly moved on; Journey to the Savage Planet debuted on Stadia on February 1st, the same day Google shut down its Stadia studios and its employees were either absorbed into other parts of Google or let go.
Journey to the Savage Planet was developed by Typhoon Studios, a studio Google acquired to build out its first-party Stadia titles. Players of the game found a number of bugs, including one that wouldn’t let certain players get past the main menu. We haven’t been able to verify that all the bugs are fixed, but we imagine Google wouldn’t say it’s patched unless the game-breaking ones are gone. On Reddit, the company merely says “this issue should now be resolved.”
Eurogamer reported that Reddit users had been complaining about the issues for weeks. As employees at Typhoon Studios had either left Google or moved on to new roles, Journey to the Savage Planet players on Stadia had been trying to reach out to both Google and publisher 505 Games. While 505 Games published the game on other platforms, it’s Google that owns all the game code and data according to a support response that Reddit users claim to have received.
But the reality was that part of Stadia’s game development team was still working on this patch, Google tells The Verge. While it’s a little weird the company wasn’t able to communicate that earlier, it’s possible they didn’t want to draw attention to an issue that was already being fixed.
After the media reports, Google did step in to confirm it was looking into the issues. “We’re aware of this and our team is diligently working with our partner publisher on a fix,” said the Stadia team on Twitter earlier today. A Google employee also posted on the Stadia subreddit to confirm the company was looking into the issues.
Journey to the Savage Planet was one of the first games to launch from Google’s Stadia Games and Entertainment first party internal development organization. It’s now shaping up to be a memorable last one, too. It’s still bundled free as part of Google’s Stadia Pro subscription.
Update, 1:56PM ET: Rewrote headline and portions of the article to reflect that Google has now issued a patch.