There's no way Stadia will succeed. Sure, Google care now, but they are gonna drop this like a hot potato once the promotions come through.
From speaking to devs who engage with Google on Stadia, it appears to be a tire fire, in that the Google people don't appear to care about how much work the gamedevs need to put in to keep up with their API changes (much like lots of Google services, actually).
Because of the poor devrel, I will be incredibly shocked if Stadia survives another two years.
Without a financial incentive, I'm not sure Stadia would have any games, and financial incentives don't fix the extra work needed when google change things for no reason (or not for a reason that gamedevs are likely to accept).
It sounds like Google has plenty of plans for Stadia in the years to come.
> What I can tell you is that we’ve built a roadmap of about 400 games in development right now from 200 developers. So when those games land, whether it’s in the calendar year of 2021 or beyond, is something that you’ll hear more from us in the future. Will there be more developers and more games on the platform? Absolutely. But frankly speaking, my team is almost done with 2021. We’re thinking about 2022 right now — that’s our focus. 2023 is really kind of where we’re aiming our sights. 2021 is in incredible shape. Hopefully, that gives you a sense of the scale of where we’re moving.
Sorry, this just seems unrealistic. This isn't some half-arsed software project that would be used for promotions and out. This required real, big, physical investment.
And they are charging. I have no idea how many Stadia users exist, but let's use 1 million since I've seen that number thrown around. If even a quarter of those are paying for pro, that's >25 million a year in revenue. A drop in the bucket to Google, but not something you'd just throw away. I expect this number to at least quadruple next year, based on their recent uptick in advertising and hardware giveaways.
$25mn is probably a small(er) advertising client. And note that the Stadia revenue mostly gets sent to game developers, and developers only build for Stadia because they are paid a lot of money by Google.
I actually think the purpose of Stadia is to demonstrate that this can be done, and it will be dropped by the end of 2023.
From speaking to devs who engage with Google on Stadia, it appears to be a tire fire, in that the Google people don't appear to care about how much work the gamedevs need to put in to keep up with their API changes (much like lots of Google services, actually).
Because of the poor devrel, I will be incredibly shocked if Stadia survives another two years.
Without a financial incentive, I'm not sure Stadia would have any games, and financial incentives don't fix the extra work needed when google change things for no reason (or not for a reason that gamedevs are likely to accept).