Game publishers will see Google Stadia as an opportunity and an adversary, according to rival streaming service Blade’s newly-appointed CEO. Speaking to PCGamesN, Jérôme Arnaud sees Stadia’s own in-house studio as a potential tripping point in Google’s plan for world streaming domination, and believes publishers will prioritise traditional storefronts instead.
“As a publisher you will see Stadia as a possibility, but sometimes also as competition, because they are going to have their own studio. So being Epic, being Blizzard, you don’t necessarily wish to collaborate that much with Stadia, you would rather privilege the channels which are going to the end user through your classical stores and etc., which we are offering.”
Google has founded its own game studio, Stadia Games and Entertainment, to produce first-party titles for its upcoming streaming service, which is set to launch November 19. The latest from Google also suggests it will invest heavily in game development. Following an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, studio head Jade Raymond confirms the company plans to go much further, with multiple first-party studios set to produce Stadia-exclusive titles year in, year out.
And that could put major game developers and publishers at odds with Stadia, or at least less willing to actively market the platform to its players – especially if Stadia, effectively a rival publisher’s platform, were to step on any toes with a game release.
To the contrary, Ubisoft has embraced Stadia with open arms. The publisher has been working alongside Google to optimise its various titles – from Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey to Ghost Recon Breakpoint – for the streaming service. Other major publishers have also happily loaded their games onto the platform, including Rockstar, CD Projekt Red, and Bethesda.
Bethesda also announced at E3 its own platform-agnostic game engine optimisation toolbox for streaming called Bethesda Orion.
“This make us believe that we have a real role to play. And that can help us to become much bigger than we are today,” Arnaud adds regarding Shadow’s position in the cloud streaming market.
Blade Shadow operates as an entire Windows 10 PC in the cloud, and therefore any game available on that OS are also compatible with the Shadow servers. That’s perhaps why it’s slightly more inclined to believe there will be a partially uneasy relationship between Stadia and major devs.