Google Stadia is dead. Well, dying in January. While it always struggled to get off the ground, it had a dedicated fanbase and people who found some incredibly clever uses for it. Destiny 2 players will be familiar with Lucky "Luckstruck9" Lai, also known as 'The Checkpoint Guy'.
He's been making use of 11 Stadia accounts to share checkpoints with fellow raiders, cutting out the more mundane parts of loot grinding. It's something our own Destiny Guy Tim Clark has made good use of. But with the disappearance of Stadia, it casts an uncertain future for The Checkpoint Guy and reliant raiders.
Thankfully, it seems as though Lai is already hard at work hunting for new methods. He tweeted that everything will still be good until Stadia's closure on January 18, and is "looking for new substitutes" in the meantime. "GeForce now looks promising, but there are still limits on session length thus making it not the most feasible option," he surmised in a reply. It's a fair point—the free version only allows a one-hour session, but even the premium version caps you at six hours.
Just to give some more details on this, we will at least be set until January 18th. However, we are looking for new substitutes. Read the replies for more info on specific methods. https://t.co/gffhVeEUw1September 29, 2022
There's apparently the choice to try and run things off a virtual machine too, but that comes with its own pitfalls like upkeep costs and getting hardware beefy enough to deal with all the instances. Add to that the small matter that virtual machines are technically bannable and it's a potentially risky endeavour.
Right now, Lai says the simplest solution is making things a wider effort. "Community-based checkpoints is one of the easiest solutions assuming people can familiarise themselves with the system," he continued. There's currently the ability to do that through Lai's Discord, and he says it would only need "around 11 people AFKing at the same time" to get similar results to what he's pulling off with Stadia.
Having a poke around Lai's Discord server and it seems like players are already hard at work assisting in brainstorming long-term solutions. A discussion thread has a handful of users tossing in a variety of ideas, but right now a mod has said "the current plan is we're still looking at all our options." With just over 100 days until Stadia's demise, it's (hopefully) plenty of time for dedicated raiders to lend their thoughts and possibly their checkpoints.
