Google Has a New Strategy for Stadia (Premium)

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?

The answer, for now, appears to be yes. As part of its virtual Google for Games Developer Summit 2022 keynote, Careen Yapp noted several ways in which the company is improving the end-user Stadia service we know today. (This starts at about 1:04:30 in the video if you’re interested in watching it for yourself.)

Yapp noted that Google is making it possible for people to browse the Stadia store online without first signing in to their Google account. They’re making it easier for gamers to find Stadia titles through Google Search with “click-to-play” links. And they’re introducing a new Stadia feature that will let gamers trial a full version of games via click-to-play without signing up or paying anything; this requires no work on the developer’s part, and they can determine how much of the game is available during this free trial. (This feature was trialed with just a handful of titles last year to great success.)

Google is also greatly expanding the number of devices on which customers can access Stadia. It’s already available on PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, Android phones and tablets, iPhones, iPads, LG smart TVs, and Android TVs and Google Cast devices. And Samsung is adding compatibility via its Samsung Gaming Hub on 2022 smart TVs and displays this year.

For developers interested in porting to Stadia, Google is likewise making that process easier with automatic DirectX translation, improved Unity and Unreal Engine support, and cloud-native playtest and quality assurance capabilities. This all results in what Google calls “low change porting,” significantly reducing the time and effort it takes to get Windows games onto Stadia. The firm is testing these tools with several partners now and expects to roll them out to the entire ecosystem later this year.

Finally, Google is also making Stadia more lucrative to game makers through a series of incentive programs. 70 percent of Stadia’s monthly subscription revenues go to game makers, as do 85 percent of so-called transactional revenues (which I assume means in-app revenues). There’s also a new affiliate marketing program that pays game makers $10 for every player that converts to a Stadia Pro subscription after using their click to play link. “No other game publisher does this,” Yapp said, adding that the program will be live for all developers by June.

Yapp also said that Stadia now has a competitive slate of over 200 titles available today and that Google will 100+ new titles coming this year. (It also added 100+ in 2021.) That doesn’t sound like a service on the way out.

OK, so what about this notion of Google basically reselling the Stadia backend to third-party game studios that wish to directly connect with their own customers?

As I wrote last year, this strategy makes sense. Google is one of the few tech giants—the others being Microsoft and Amazon—that have the infrastructure and capacity to offer such a service at scale. And as with Microsoft’s new Xbox strategy, aligning Stadia with the firm’s cloud services goals likewise makes sense.

So it is with no surprise that I can tell you that Google’s new offering for third parties is a Google Cloud service called Immersive Stream for Games. There is likewise no surprise in the news that it tested this offering last year with AT&T, which offered the game Batman: Arkham Knight for free to AT&T mobile carrier subscribers, but via PCs over Wi-Fi, go figure. This week, however, AT&T said that it would expand the availability of this title to its customers over its 5G networks, and that it will add additional titles.

As is the case with Stadia, Google is working on tools that make it easier for game makers to port their titles to Immersive Stream for Games and will include discoverability features like click-to-play trials, as on Stadia.

In my experience, Google Stadia offers the best technology for game streaming today—meaning that it has the lowest latency and lag, at least when paired with Google’s innovative Stadia controller—and so offering this technology to third parties makes sense. As a consumer, I’d rather just have a single service to go to for playing games, but given Stadia’s relatively slow start, this is at least a viable business strategy that could help prop up the first-party service. And it’s perhaps not surprising to see game streaming evolve similarly to movie and TV show streaming, with a multitude of similar services appearing over time.

And maybe that’s the point. Wherever the blame lies with Stadia’s lack of success so far, the service can at least move forward thanks to its positioning within the broader Google Cloud offerings. And assuming game makers sign-up—for either Stadia directly, or Immersive Stream for Games, or both—then there’s a real future there. This is good for consumers, for Google, and for game makers. You know, assuming it works.

I think it can work. And I hope it does work, if only because this kind of competition is better for gamers and will ensure that rival platform makers like Microsoft and Amazon keep innovating and improving their own offerings.

And Google does, of course, have a Plan B of sorts: at the Google for Games Developer Summit this week, it also provided a few more details about its plans to bring games to Windows via Google Play Games for PC, a service that is now available only in very limited markets. This product appears to work similarly to the Android Subsystem for Windows in Windows 11 in that it uses what Google calls “high-performance emulation” to run Android titles directly in Windows, rather than stream them from the cloud. And I like that this service uses Xbox Play Anywhere-like technology to support game continuation across multiple devices and device types. (What I don’t like is that Google is explicitly going its own way with this offering rather than working with Microsoft to ensure it’s as good as it can be.)

While both Stadia/Immersive Stream for Games and Google Play Games for PC both offer games to consumers, they are, of course, very different solutions. I feel like cloud streaming is the future of gaming, and that it will one day replace consoles as a major segment of the market. But services like Google Play Games for PC, which require users to download games before they can be played, is a more traditional service that will sit alongside other app stores. And it, too, could find a place in the market. Its cross-platform approach certainly sets it apart from other services, notably Apple’s Apple-centric Apple Arcade.

I have no particular stake here. I’m an Xbox gamer, after all. But I’d like to see Stadia—and Immersive Stream for Games (and Google Play Games for PC)—succeed. It’s a good service, and it’s good technology. And choice is never a bad thing.