Today’s Stadia Connect further reinforces developer excitement around the platform

Today at Google’s Stadia Connect, a ton of new titles were announced for Stadia and we’re extremely excited about a few of those, including Watchdogs 3, Super Hot, and Cyberpunk 2077. While new game titles were clearly the theme for this Stadia Connect, I was actually more struck by some of the comments in the behind-the-scenes segments where developers talked not only about their upcoming games, but about Stadia as a platform.

It’s a very technologically demanding game, but with Stadia, you can actually play it irrespective of the power of your devices.

– Cyberpunk 2077: CD Projekt Red

We were invited to check out Stadia back in January of 2018. Google handed us the controllers and allowed us to play an early version of Doom running on Stadia. And it was great! Right away it was a fantastic experience. I immediately saw it as the next transformative platform coming to the industry. Kinda the same feeling I got when I saw the iPhone coming and what thought that might mean for games. We knew that we wanted to be a part of it.

– Orcs Must Die 3: Robot Entertainment CEO

We noticed the difference when we actually started playing the build on Stadia. That’s what everyone’s going to get. They’re not going to be subject to the power of their machine. Everybody gets that same massive power: that’s a big deal.

In the war scenarios, now, you’re going to have a 500-mob army in one single wave. And that’s not spread out cleverly, like 50 guys here, 50 guys here: that’s 500 orcs. That’s what Stadia made possible.

– Orcs Must Die 3: Robot Entertainment Design Director

What really convinced us to bring Mortal Kombat to Stadia was seeing the fast, fluid gameplay replicated on the platform. With a game like ours, that’s very important to us. We have a certain quality bar we have to maintain, and with Stadia, we feel that we can acheive that.

Since the beginning of development of Mortal Kombat for Stadia, Google has been with us all along the way. They’ve been a great partner to help us make sure that we’re achieving the quality that we expect of our game and that the players expect as well.

It is legitimately cool to be able to pause the game and then go to your phone and play it on the phone. That’s pretty cool.

– Mortal Kombat 11: Warner Brothers

It is worth noting that these aren’t small, upstart development shops. These are seasoned companies that have been making video games for a long time and doing it better than most. When you get CEOs and design directors excited by a platform, you’re doing something right. There’s no real scenario where Google gets this type of developer support without delivering on the performance side.

Nay-sayers and doubters can go on all they want about the possible failure of not just Stadia, but cloud gaming in general. None of it changes the fact that Stadia is not only working solution for developers, but also a platform that is allowing them to do things previously not possible in their games. Reading the lead developer’s comments from Orcs Must Die 3 get me more excited about Stadia than just about anything else. Imagine the possibilities on offer when developers begin leveraging the raw computing power available to them in Stadia. The possibilities are mind-boggling.

I can tell you this: people who build and play games are excited about the possibilities of Stadia, and so are we. Check out the entire list of games announced today and you’ll see that Google has the industry’s attention in a pretty significant way:

• Attack on Titan 2: Final Battle
• Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
• Baldur’s Gate 3
• Borderlands 3
• Cyberpunk 2077
• Darksiders Genesis
• Destroy All Humans
• Destiny 2
• Doom (2016)
• Doom Eternal
• Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2
• Farming Simulator 19
• Final Fantasy XV
• Football Manager
• Get Packed
• GRID
• Gylt
• Just Dance
• Kine
• Metro Exodus
• Mortal Kombat 11
• NBA 2K
• Orcs Must Die 3
• Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid
• Rage 2
• Samurai Shodown
• SUPERHOT
• The Elder Scrolls Online
• Thumper
• Tomb Raider Definitive Edition
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Rise of the Tomb Raider
• Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint
• Tom Clancy’s The Division 2
• Trials Rising
• The Crew 2
• Watch Dogs Legion
• Wolfenstein: Youngblood
• Windjammers 2

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With the 2-3 month window Google still has before Stadia becomes fully available, I’d expect to only see this list continue growing. Whether or not there will be another Stadia Connect before launch is yet to be seen, but with what we already know about the platform, a growing list of games on offer, and continued excitement by the game makers themselves, it is hard not to get very excited about trying Stadia out in November for ourselves.