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Google's working on first-party Stadia games that will demonstrate the unique capabilities of cloud-based game, but it could take a while for them to arrive. Google announced its first dedicated, internal game studio for Stadia in Montreal today, and "less than a month before release" is not the typical time frame for video game platforms to start working on their killer first-party titles.
Even if the timing is unusual, Stadia Games & Entertainment boss Jade Raymond confirmed in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz that she sees internal game development as an essential way to show what Stadia can do.
"It's very important for first-party games, in my opinion, to be games that wouldn't be possible on any other platform," Raymond said. "I think that's what's really exciting and why we're building out the first-party teams [...] There are a lot of things that being cloud native enables that you're just not going to be able to see on other platforms, and I think that's the job of first-party, to really show that off and let people imagine what those things are."
Raymond mentioned fully physics simulated games as one of the "Holy Grails" that could be closer to reality with Stadia's cloud gaming model. Games built specifically for Stadia could also take new approaches to multiplayer, since "everyone is essentially playing in one big LAN party as far as the tech is concerned."
Non-gaming related Google technologies like the Duplex AI phone assistant could also be put to new purposes with Stadia-exclusive games: "Instead of having the usual quest-giver that repeats a static line of dialogue, imagine having Google Duplex-powered believable human interactions embedded in any game that has narrative."
That could either be really cool or hilariously broken, and I want to play it either way. Raymond admitted it "may be several years" until Google's internal studios create a big new game that will make full use of all of Stadia's possibilities, but that they have several projects in the works that will show off more of the platform's possibilities in the meantime.
This is what I was asking for when I said I want to be sold on Stadia, but Google still hasn't given me a reason. I kinda assumed they were already working on some first-party games when they announced Stadia, though...
