Update: Journey To The Savage Planet's start-up crash has been fixed, a representative for Google announced on Reddit this week. While the patch is unable to repair corrupted saves, the main menu will now tell you if a file is corrupted, letting you delete it to revert to the most recent unaffected save.
Original Story: Last month, Journey To The Savage Planet made its Stadia debut. Unfortunately, the sci-fi adventure is broken—and Google just fired all the developers who could've fixed it.
Among various crashes and lockups, Savage Planet's Stadia version has a particularly nasty main menu freeze that can make the game effectively unplayable. But when searching for a fix for this issue, Redditor lordubuntu quickly discovered that nobody seems to know who's responsible for looking after the game.
Posting screenshots from various channels, Google first told them to contact the game's publisher, 505. But 505 explained that it isn't responsible for publishing Savage Planet on Stadia—that responsibility falls to Google's Stadia Games and Entertainment, a studio Google shuttered this month.
Posting in the comments to the above Reddit thread, a Stadia community manager claimed that Google is "actively working" for a solution to these issues.
"Hi folks, I understand how frustrating this situation is, and I'm sorry for the delayed update. We're actively working with our partners to identify a fix, and I will do my best to pass updates along."
Stadia's Twitter account echoed that sentiment, similarly stating it is working with a "partner publisher" in response to concerns. But considering 505's denial of involvement with the game's Stadia port, there's plenty of confusion over which publisher Google is talking about.
Thanks for the details. We're aware of this and our team is diligently working with our partner publisher on a fix. We'd suggest keeping an eye on our social channels for updates. We appreciate your patience!February 21, 2021
Developer Typhoon Studios was one of the first to be acquired by Google back in 2019, with Savage Planet being the closest Stadia had to a "first-party" game (despite coming out on PC and consoles last year). But that also meant that when Google shut down its internal studios, Typhoon's employees were fired as part of roughly 150 redundancies.
A week before those layoffs began, Stadia boss Phil Harrison reportedly told employees that the team was making "great progress". Stadia is now the target of a class-action lawsuit, after consumers claim they were misled over the platform's 4K capabilities.
