At its Google for Games Developer Summit on Tuesday, Google slyly confirmed rumors that it is pivoting Stadia to be a different kind of service. That is, where Stadia today directly targets consumers who wish to stream games from the cloud, the Stadia of tomorrow will be available to third-party game studios and publishers that wish to directly target consumers themselves. This strategy makes sense. But I do have some questions.
The first and most obvious is whether these two strategies are mutually exclusive: that is, can’t Google continue with Stadia as-is while offering the underlying technologies to others too?