Google today announced its first Stadia Games and Entertainment studio in Montréal. Tasked with producing “exclusive, original content,” an interview with games chief Jade Raymond reveals a rough roadmap for what kind of and when unique experiences will be possible.
Speaking to gamesindustry.biz, the Google VP laid out the tiered party structure for Stadia games going forward. These “spectrum of bets” are differentiated by how much they take advantage of features that are only possible with Stadia’s cloud-based platform:
Third-party: The first games that will begin debuting in November are mostly existing ones, though some — like Ghost Recon Breakpoint — are already taking advantage of exclusive functionality.
Second-party: Coming next are titles from independent developers. According to Raymond, these partners will get closer to taking full advantage of Stadia, but not fully. Regardless, Google will be providing support on par with its internal studios.
“Initially we’re going to have some interesting indie-style titles we sign and they might look a little different, or take advantage of a YouTube integration, or have a different role for a streamer,” Raymond says. “But they won’t right away solve every problem or uncover every possibility of what cloud-native gaming is going to open up.”
First-party: Google is building a “few different first-party studios” beyond Montréal, and “quite a few exclusive games in the works.” In terms of timeline, yearly releases are expected with increasing frequency over time.
Raymond directly name-checked Google Duplex in the gamesindustry.biz interview as a way to make non-player characters more realistic. That technology allows Assistant to place natural-sounding calls on behalf of the user for restaurant reservations, and could replace scripted lines for “believable human interactions embedded in any game that has narrative.”
More about Google Stadia:
- Google clarifies when Stadia Founder’s and Premiere Edition ships
- Google sells out of Stadia Founder’s Edition in all 14 launch countries
- Stadia Controller’s wireless play coming to more devices ‘soon after launch’
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