Unity: Stadia "steers how we think about making the tools"

At the Game Developer Conference (GDC) recently we got the chance to talk with Unity product manager Will Goldstone about what the company is working on, and during our conversation we couldn't help but talk about the recently-announced Google Stadia platform, and what that means for them.

"I think the emphasis with it is they're eroding a lot of the friction to get a game to a consumer," he said. "So some of the friction is obviously hardware, and they've addressed that with the Google Cloud platform, and that being able to serve up Stadia as a service, but the other thing for the developer is, like you point out, the ability to think 'well, I have to put this on this level hardware, so for me as a developer I have to buy all of this hardware to test it on, and I have to scale and I have to profile on all these different devices', and I think what Stadia's trying to do is really erode some of the friction for the developer as well."

"So for us that makes a huge difference because it actually steers how we think about making the tools, and it allows us to think about.... we can focus on certain types of profiling tools and really create, hopefully, more opportunities for people to get their games across a broader range of consumer, because we won't be thinking about 'okay well this is only really viable on the Switch or only really viable on PS4', you know, things like this."

How do you think Stadia will affect developers and consumers?