Stadia’s success as a gaming platform relies on Baldur’s Gate 3

Baldur Gate 3 is coming to PC and Stadia via Early Access on September 30, 2020, Larian Studios revealed today during a direct. This is the first time that a major game will be released on Stadia alongside another major platform. Larian Studios’ enthusiasm for Stadia as a game development platform, it might have something to do with it. A huge reason why Baldur Gate 3 is coming to Stadia alongside PC, is that the developer thinks it’s easier to port a game like the big RPG from PC to Stadia than to an Xbox or PlayStation console. But not only that, Larin Studios has been pretty vocal about the developer tools Stadia offers and what it can do with those tools it previously couldn’t on PC and console.

In today’s stream, the developers showed something called Choice of the crowd, something Larian Studios has talked about a lot before and is a feature exclusive to Stadia developer tools at the moment. If someone broadcasts Baldur Gate 3 and if the Crowd Choice option is enabled, certain points in the game trigger a pop-up poll in the chat window to allow viewers to vote on what they think needs to happen. The most popular response will trigger this thing even in the game. With this feature, viewers can affect the outcome of a dice roll, dialogue with an NPC, or even sweet, sweet loot that is in a chest. Locked.

This seems to have a lot of potential to not only influence how a YouTube or Twitch audience interacts with someone who is streaming. Baldur Gate 3, but depending on how successful the feature is, more developers might consider building gameplay mechanics around it and turning it into a sell feature, as Larian Studios is attempting. It could not only mean more games available on Stadia, but maybe even the same day press releases.

But it all depends on how Crowd Choice, and undoubtedly other features, are built into the game itself, and whether Crowd Choice gets more players to opt for the Stadia version of Baldur Gate 3 on PC. After all, you can play Stadia for free, and if you play it on your PC, you don’t need to buy a Chromecast or a Stadia controller, just the game. Even if you already have a gaming rig. super tricked you might be better off buying the Stadia version (if you have a good internet connection) just to try out Stadia’s Crowd Choice feature in a private feed with friends. The PC version of Baldur Gate 3 will not have this functionality, even if it could allow players to see what decisions their friends are making in co-op multiplayer. It doesn’t sound so exciting.

If done well, it could also encourage some developers to transfer their games to Stadia. Games like Life is strange, Man of Medan, Without beef, and other games with player choice as the core mechanic that I could see working well with this Stadia feature. And if more and more developers start porting or building their games for Stadia, the bigger game library Stadia has to offer and the more serious gaming platform becomes.

But even if developer interest in Stadia increases after that, Google will have to start paying its developers more if he wants to build a bigger library of games. There is also what persists worry that Google will abandon Stadia like it has abandoned other big projects in the past. But at the same time Crowd Choice, won’t fundamentally change the game, it’s interesting enough to know where – and I never thought I’d say that before, but there you go – I want to buy Baldur Gate 3 on Stadia instead of PC.