Google Stadia Pro games for December, Buddy Pass is live and new hires - a roundup

Google are pushing forward with their game streaming service Stadia, here's a little roundup of what they've been doing recently. See Also: Our initial thoughts on Stadia.

For people who purchased the Founders Edition, it came with a Buddy Pass system enabling you to gift a three month Stadia Pro subscription to a friend. That's now actually live. If you have it, you can find the option to do so in the Stadia mobile application (the little ticket button in the top left corner).

Also announced recently is the next set of games available to those with Stadia Pro, which everyone has right now since Stadia Base doesn't launch until next year. Google did a bit of a misstep here though, as the games announced are:

• Farming Simulator 19 Platinum Edition
• Tomb Raider Definitive Edition

Both of which are games on their store already that people have been purchasing. Tomb Raider is even running a discount. Thankfully, they are offering refunds to anyone who picked either up and it seems like the process to get a refund is working well.

According to VGC, Google have also now hired multiple developers who previously worked at Ubisoft on titles like Watch Dogs and Assassin's Creed for their first-party studio Stadia Games and Entertainment based in Montréal. It's likely going to be some time before we see their initial games developed exclusively for Stadia.

Rough launch and missing features aside, the experience we've had with Stadia is still quite positive and not a single major hiccup when played across our multiple Linux machines. The convenience it offers is really something, being able to load up something like Destiny 2 on Manjaro or Ubuntu play for a few hours and then move into a different room with only a TV and a Chromecast and within 2 minutes have the game back up in the same place offers an interesting look into what's possible.