Google Stadia will support "various business models"

Last month, when Google announced its next Stadia streaming game platform, Google left open the big question of exactly how Google and game developers would earn money with these games running on servers. apart. Phil Harrison, of Google, said during a panel discussion this week at GamesBeat Summit in Los Angeles that "our platform at a fundamental level has been designed to support a very wide variety of what the people call "monetization options." Everything from the purchase to the transaction to the subscription. "

This is not a direct confirmation that all of these options will be available to developers on Stadia. All Harrison would say is that "there is no technical limit on how we designed the platform to support various business models. "(This is us underlining.) But this architecture would be very odd for Harrison if, for example, Google was considering imposing a single solution – suitable for all Stadia users.

In discussing Stadia, Harrison emphasized how the platform makes it easy to share a game via a link in a text message, for example, or by allowing people to instantly switch to the game. Instance of a game they're watching on YouTube at some point in the video. This form of game discovery could "change the way the game value is perceived by players," Harrison said, removing the "pressure from retail stores" and limiting the "outside" selection of bricks and mortar. mortar and digital showcases. "When a game is a link, the Internet is your store," he said. "It means we can change the perceived value of games."

This kind of "friction-free" discovery of new games becomes a bit more frictional, however, if players have to buy a complete game every time they click on a Stadia link. Unlimited subscriptions, free advertising-financed games and timed trials could all help to reduce these frictions. It seems that all these options and many others could work on Stadia.

Harrison said Google would provide more details on Stadia's business plan "in the summer", explaining "how players will be able to buy games and have access to games". At the same time, "we will talk about the games themselves" that will be available on the platform. This first wave of Stadia titles, he said, will aim to attract "a type of player familiar with AAA games … games and familiar types of games." After that, he envisions "concentric circles of games" that invite a wider audience "to reach a much larger scale, to which we aspire".

The long term

Harrison remains confident that streaming gaming will revolutionize the gaming sector, especially as broadband infrastructure continues to improve around the world. He noted that the EU had placed Internet access at the level of human rights. "I do not think that they said that access to a high-end gaming computer was considered a human right," he joked, to highlight the lower hurdles to the # 39, entrance to Stadia.

At the same time, Harrison warns that the move to the streaming game "will not happen overnight." It will not be a change that we will switch and we will all find ourselves in this utopia of the cloud-based game. a while to reach the scale we think we can reach. "

Part of that transition will be a developer familiarization with the power of Google's cloud infrastructure, Harrison said. For decades, game developers had to be "device centric," Harrison said, designing games that meet specific and limited hardware specifications. "With cloud games, especially the idea that computers can be shared between multiple processors in a data center, this transition to data-centric games is fundamentally changing," he said.

Developers who commit to making the most of it will be able to do everything from "distributed physics" to "complex multiplayer ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands in a very sophisticated world," he said. . In Stadia multiplayer games, "Any changes I make in my world can be instantly, in microseconds or less, to be distributed to all other customers … You can not do this with a discrete box."

This is very similar to the kind of "breakthrough" features promised by Microsoft that would be possible on Xbox One through integration with its Azure cloud. Fully destructible environments in Crackdown 3 & # 39; s The multiplayer mode was perhaps the most publicized implementation of Microsoft's promise so far, but it was a little disappointing in practice.

Elsewhere in the conversation, Harrison has also begun to develop superb visions of Stadia games with a "conversational understanding" of spoken player commands transmitted through the controller's built-in microphone. Google's research on AI and machine learning could help create games with NPCs that "respond contextually," he said, using data center storage to create a "huge database" offering many time conversation options. A similar machine learning job could also one day help Stadia's developers to create less expensive content, with less manpower and time, Harrison suggested.

Announcement by Google