Stadia Pro Free Games For March Include PixelJunk Raiders Exclusive

Google's announcement of the shutdown of its own, in-house, first-party game development studio for Stadia has had many doubting the future of the game streaming service, both in this particular case and in general. Stadia, of course, has repeatedly assured customers and partners alike that all is well and the service will grow even more this year, even without the Stadia Games & Entertainment studio. In addition to the promised 100 games planned throughout the year, it is now announcing its four free games for March, including one Stadia-exclusive.

Although its purpose is to make existing PC games available for streaming on almost any device, Stadia needs its own exclusive titles to set itself apart, especially from something like NVIDIA's GeForce NOW and Amazon Luna. Crayta was one of those exclusives but that was actually for a limited time only before the game creation game expanded to other stores on the PC.

PixelJunk Raiders, on the other hand, might actually be exclusive on Stadia in the purest sense, though it might be too early to conclude that. Developed by Q-Games, the cel-shaded action RPG has players fighting aliens bent on harvesting people's life forces. Stadia teases the game uses State Share to allow players to share their game states with others with more details promised to follow.

PixelJunk Raiders will be available on March 1 for $19.99 but it will be part of March's free selection for Stadia Pro subscribers. The other three include multiplayer PAC-MAN Mega Tunnel Battle, detective strategy Reigns, and music video game AVICII: Invector.

Stadia is also adding more games to its collection, including Welcome to Elk and two Shantae titles. It definitely proves, at least for now, that Stadia is still going and going strong though, as expected, some are still not impressed but the game streaming service's short catalog.