Google Stadia has announced a new partnership with Unity to allow the company to begin offering direct support for developers on the platform. Stadia Makers is the title of the new program, and it aims to create and distribute development kits and other resources to help teams big and small bring their games to Stadia. The new program will have various initiatives within it, aiming to support products due in the next two years.
In the program’s announcement post the team admits what pretty much everyone already knew. Stadia and its teams were rather unprepared for the launch of the service. This could have easily been gleaned from the lack of features at launch, as well as the pretty abysmal set of launch day titles. Still, it’s nice to see Google trying to correct their mistakes and not just abandoning the service to crash and burn.
Stadia has also been trying to add various new games, like a bunch of classic Sega titles, but fans always want more. In addition to development support to optimize games for the service, Google will be offering the top-tier of developers a set of funding initiatives to help offset the cost of porting games or making new IPs for the Stadia service.
Google will also be tapping into the wealth of knowledge and experience offered by Unity’s teams to help make Stadia’s games run better with that particular engine.
“The fact of the matter is that far more studios applied to be a part of our launch than we could work with at the time,” writes the Stadia team. “Thank you for your ambition, patience, and support that those applications represent. Now that we’re a few months down the road, we’ve improved our tools and built new partnerships that will let us work with more independent studios.”
Google and Unity are looking to build more support for each other in both of their platforms, with releases supported by the Stadia Makers program aiming for a release in later 2020, or possibly 2021.
