Despite few of its own first-party exclusives at launch, Google apparently wasn’t shy about paying large sums to third-party publishers to have their titles on Stadia. A recent report from Bloomberg indicates Stadia head Phil Harrison sought to make an impact by having titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 on the platform. Deals like this cost “tens of millions of dollars” according to sources.
Presumably, this was meant to provide some kind of boost for the platform at launch. The money that Google was looking to spend apparently “came as a shock” to veteran developers. The report also notes that Stadia’s developers were still optimistic despite the lackluster launch and were working on a variety of prototypes.
One such prototype was a fusion of a Tamagotchi and Google Assistant that would open up different kinds of interactions. None of these ever came to fruition due to the closure of Stadia Games and Entertainment and the circumstances surrounding continue to remain controversial. We’ll see where Stadia goes from here in the coming months.
