Since it’s announcement, Google’s Stadia game streaming platform seems to have attracted a lot of attention from developers. However, it looks like the tech giant isn’t just letting anyone in. Rather, the service looks to be much more heavily curated compared to storefronts like Steam.
Stadia business development manager Ray Bautista discussed Google’s process of accepting games at GamesIndustry‘s Investment Summit at PAX Dev earlier this week. Here, he stated that Google was being much more careful with what games they would be allowing into the service.
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“It was important for us with Stadia that we moved away from the Wild West that exists in some storefronts today,” stated Bautista said. “Just because a studio has a game idea doesn’t mean we’re going to allow them to publish that game on our platform. Just because a developer or publisher releases a game that was a success, we certainly aren’t going to allow ten, 20, 50 fast follows to come after that.
While Bautista didn’t name any specific services, the comment seems to have been aimed at Steam. Valve, which runs Steam, has garnered a reputation for being very hands off with the curation of games on the service. The company tends to prefer having the community handle it through the Steam Curators program.
From his statements, Bautista seems to indicate that Google will be much more heavily involved in selecting and promoting games for Stadia. “It’s important to us that we are looking at every single piece of content that comes to our platform to really help spotlight developers, showcase the talented developers and content that’s coming out, and more importantly make sure we’re proud of the content that’s being released on the platform,” he continued.
As part of his talk, Bautista also went over the process of submitting a game for Stadia. He described a pretty lengthy and thorough process for submitting and vetting games for the service. One way for a game to get picked for Stadia though, make sure it has something that’s either unique to the service, or that works better because of it. He specifically singled out Orc Must Die 3, touting the number of units the game could have on screen as something that would be hard to render on most home computers, but easily done through streaming.
