New details regarding Google’s efforts to launch and get its Stadia cloud gaming subscription service have been reported on this Friday. It’s well-known that Google went big from the very first dayStadialaunched, advertising and offering a wide variety of AAA releases. What’s now being reported is that Google spent astonishingly high costs to publishers to port their games to Stadia. And, as is now apparent, it hasn’t worked out as Google had planned.
A report from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier goes into detail regarding Google’s strategies for Stadia. A big focus for Stadia, and ultimately one of the platform’s biggest errors, was a focus on major AAA releases.Stadia partnered with Ubisoftand Bethesda to get games likeAssassin’s CreedandDoom. Stadia paid big for those games, too, paying “tens of millions of dollars” for games likeRed Dead Redemption 2, as confirmed by two different sources familiar with the situation.
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The rest of Schreier’s report goes on to explore other examples of Google trying to go very big very quickly. Perhaps the best example being its quick investment in internal game development. It mentions Google bringing in veteran studio leadJade Raymond, who had been leading Ubisoft’s Motive studio, as an example of the kind of push Google was making. Of course, everyone now knows how that turned out. At the start of February, Google shut down all internal game development with no games launched.
While it’s difficult to say what Google could have done differently, Schreier does pose a different scenario on Twitter. He says that instead of giving $20 million to Ubisoft to bringAssassin’s CreedandThe Division 2to Stadia, imagine if Google had paid $1 million to 20 small developers, “betting that at least one of them will be a hit likeStardew ValleyorValheim.” Obviously, that’s not what happened, but it does frame what Google did do.
Stadia isn’t gone, of course; it’s still available. It’s also continuing to release exclusives, like therecently announcedPixelJunk Raiders. Perhaps Stadia is shifting direction going forward or perhaps it’s slowly winding down. It’s a frustrating situation for Stadia users to be in, to be sure.
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