Serious Sam’s Baffling Stadia Exclusivity

Google keeps the iconic shooter franchise off consoles into 2021

Serious Sam Collection Stadia screenshot taken by the author.

We’re just a few weeks away from the release of Serious Sam 4, the latest installment in the long-running hardcore PC action shooter franchise. But if you’re a console player hoping to test the game out on your current machine or one of this fall’s new consoles…you’re out of luck until some unspecified date next year.

You see Croteam, the makers of Serious Sam, signed a multi-game exclusivity deal with Google’s Stadia platform this past spring. Serious Sam 4 will not launch on any consoles this month, and will not come out in the lucrative launch window on this November’s new platforms, instead debuting on Steam and Google’s underused and oft-derided streaming platform.

This same deal also brought the Serious Sam Collection to Stadia, which is actually a finished version of Serious Sam Fusion, a beta experiment first launched on Steam that was abandoned over a year ago. Collection bundles all the content from the HD remakes of the first two Serious Sam games alongside Serious Sam 3 into one big awkward uber-game.