The first notable announcement made by Google today, at the Google for Games Developer Summit, was that the stadius storefront would become accessible to anyone without the need for a consistent account (it's still restricted to users in those 22 countries where stadia is available). While this will most likely take effect in the coming weeks, according to Google, this means that anyone will be able to access and search the entire stadius store, as well as see the 200+ games, 50+ studio pro games, publisher sales, or any of the 100+ games co-developed.
Google disclosed that during the early testing of Stadia's click to play trials in October 2021, this feature resulted in a 35% boost in click-through rates compared to standard buy or claim messaging, as well as a 70% increase in player engagement.
The technical session called “how to write a windows emulator for linux from scratch” with a lot of people assuming that this would be where stadia would reveal a new tool which would instantly port windows games to the stadia platform, however it turns out this session was not showing off a finished tool for stadia developers instead it was a discussion on the core concepts that would allow developers to run a windows emulator on stadia, similar to tools like wine or proton on linux. Google did announce some new tools and functionality that will help developers bring their game to stadia, including a new initiative called low change porting which targets lowering the engineering costs and time to launch a game on stadia, low change porting includes libraries that auto translate directx.
Google has increased support for unity and the Unreal Engine, as well as cloud native play tests and quality assurance workflows. Google and Stadia are already testing low change porting with 10 studios, including paradox interactive, team 17, steel wool studios, wired productions, handy games, legacy games, milestone, sabre interactive, and nikon.
In terms of first-hand experience with low-change porting, tim schroeder, ceo of massive mini team and handy games, spoke about using these tools, saying, "stadia is offering a clean api in good documentation, and google provides a platform where we can easily work, and massive mini team and handy games are happy to bring over more titles in the future."
The last announcement from today's meeting was the unveiling of Google's business-to-business stadiums. ISG will allow customers to use Google Stadia's cloud gaming technology as well as all of Google's advancements in cloud gaming, and most recently we saw AT&T take advantage of ISG by allowing all AT&T customers to play Batman Arkham Knight for free, and with ISG Google is extending free trials, subscription bundles, and even complete storefront experiences to publishers and developers.
"In partnership with Google Cloud, we are working to build the underlying cloud gaming technology that powers both stadia and our customers offering via immersive stream for games a rising tide for cloud gaming lifts immersive streams for games as well as stadia," said stadia's head of product, Dav Zimring.