Stadia Makers Revealed With Unity, Bringing Funds For Games

This week the folks at Stadia and Unity Technologies made an announcement about their new initiative to bring new games to the cloud gaming universe. This is part of the Google for Games Developer Summit – an online event, as is the situation with most events in the world at the moment. In Stadia Makers, creators will have the potential to be given technical assistance, free development hardware, and funding.

Technical assistance offered with Stadia Makers centers on Unity. "The experts at Unity" will be providing the structure to push projects from start to finish. Hardware in this situation could range from smartphones to chromebooks – in any case, documentation says "Stadia Makers participants are eligible to receive up to five physical development kids depending on team size and structure."

Funding is key – per the release this week, Google said, "There's a very real financial consideration when it comes to developing across platforms, and Stadia will offset some of those costs."

Eligibility for this program starts with Unity. Developers need to be building their game on Unity 2019.3 or later. They'll need an expected ship date of 2020 or 2021. They'll also – obviously – need to be planning to bring their game to Stadia.

Meanwhile, Stadia's currently running with more than 30 games, "and 60 game updates" since launch in November 2019. They've suggested that they'll have "120 games that'll ship this year alone."

We've been reviewing Google Stadia since launch, too. It's an amazing platform, and certainly a setup that seems to work. Now it's just a matter of deciding whether this is the sort of future in which you want to live. Do you really own something if you can't hold it in your hand? Do you really need to own something in the first place? Can anyone ever really own a video game?