Google announced last September that it is closing Stadia. The game servers will shut down on January 18, 2023 , leaving thousands of players who trusted the American platform orphaned. The problem is that hundreds of hours of adventures and millions of half games will go away with it that we won’t be able to continue anywhere else. Or maybe yes? If you are going to migrate to PC, specifically to Steam, there is still hope.
Stadia save games
Indeed, the great news that we have to give you is that even if you play in the cloud, your Google profile stores the games as if they were a title installed in the guts of your computer and, in many cases, it even respects the same format as it is later used in places like Steam. So the first thing we are going to do is rescue all those savegames that we have generated during the time that we have used Stadia.
And the first thing is to go to Google Takeout, the service that Mountain View has to let us download all the information we generate with our Gmail account: photos, videos, emails, books, magazines, movies and of course these saved games. So after accessing the web we only choose Stadia within that information that we want to physically download to the PC.
Next we tell Google Takeout that we want to download a file and to do so in a compressed format with a maximum size of 2GB. Here you can choose what you like best, even send that export directly to your Google Drive.
If everything went well, after a few minutes you will receive an email in your Gmail inbox with the link to the game archive. You download it to your computer and proceed to unzip everything. Now comes the second part.
Where to save games on Steam
Once we have all the savegames downloaded to the computer, a folder will appear with all those saved games arranged alphabetically by the name of the game. In our case you can see that we have many Assassin’s Creed Valhalla files , but further down there are Cyberpunk 2077 , Judgment , Rage 2 , etc. The route, as you can see right here below is:
- Takeout > Stadia > GAMING > GAME_SAVE.
Now it’s time to open the Steam folder where the games of each game are saved in another window. It goes without saying that for this operation to be a success you must have bought the same game in the PC store. Now, we already know that it is a truism and a hassle to have to go through the checkout again, but since Google is going to return the expense that we have made, we can take the opportunity to reinvest it and, if we do it well, even make a profit by acquiring codes with something off.
Steam stores the games in:
- PC > Program Files (x86) > Steam > SteamApps > common > Game folder.
Then it will depend on each title that these savegames are in one place or another, but when you find it, you simply have to copy the folder with the checkpoint of the game that you want to resume along with the others.
It is important to warn, however, that some games are not compatible. In our case we ran the ones from Cyberpunk 2077 with some ease, but in the case of Judgment there was no way for the game to load them. It is a pure trial-error method that if you solve it successfully will help you avoid having to start from scratch that game that has you so enthralled.