As an aside - what benefit is there to having a game such as Terraria on Stadia in the first place? It has fairly low system requirements, and given how much energy is eaten up by server-side rendering and streaming, it seems wasteful in this context.
Gamers don't care about the tech that's being used, they only care about playing good games. If you're a Stadia user, why wouldn't you want to play Terraria? Because it's not a good use of streaming? But it's an awesome game!
Don't get me wrong, I see the appeal for Google of having it on there, but from the sidelines here, it seems to me to be terribly wasteful. It's like the energy consumption angle was never even considered. I presume it wasn't.
OT - where does your username come from? I'm sure it's not, but for a Brit to read it, it stirs thoughts of a terribly un-PC origin! :)
Man I came up with that username when I got my first Nintendo DS for christmas when I was ~9 years old. The only game I had was the Sword of Mana GBA cartridge, and that game asks you to come up with a name for both a male and female character when you start. Being a hilarious 9 year old, I wanted to give the female character an ugly sounding name, so I just started making random ugly noises with my mouth and trying to transcribe them into the text field. That's how I ended up with "bogwog"
It wasn't until a few years ago that I stumbled upon an Urban Dictionary entry for it. That was so disappointing because I always thought I was so creative coming up with that unique and interesting-sounding name...like Tolkien!
I'm definitely not important enough for anyone to bother cancelling me over it (especially considering how mild and obscure it is), but I've stopped using it just in case. I still have a lot of old accounts lingering around that use it though.
Typically deals like this are about a mixture of cash and access. The platform holder will often partially or fully fund development, sometimes they pay an advance on sales up-front. For one project I worked on Sony provided an up-front advance that fully covered the port in addition to some sales (and it took a while to recoup for reasons mostly under their control.)
My guess for this is that given Terraria's large fanbase and high profile, Google probably handed them an advance for this and promised some promotion once the title launched on Stadia. Stadia also potentially provides access to users who can't play it on PC (it has a client for phones and some TVs, etc)
I agree. Also, I don't want Stadia to become flooded with cheap indie games, at least not for now. Because the storefront is so bad (no search), it would make it very hard to find the things you want.
Google should concentrate Stadia's efforts to make AAA-games available to people who don't want a console or gaming PC, because that's a real niche.
I personally know 5 people who would never buy dedicated gaming hardware, but will get Stadia to play the latest FIFA in great quality on their work laptop or TV (with Chromecast).
Not sure how "cheap indie games" comes into the picture here, Terraria is a wildly successful and sophisticated game that's sold over 30m copies lifetime and is available on a bunch of platforms. We're not talking about a Flappy Bird clone.
