Google wants to compete with Microsoft and Amazon in the games space
Google Stadia may be no more, but Google still wants to carve a place for itself in the games sector as a cloud services provider – and competition for Microsoft and Amazon Games. Google Cloud’s director of game industry solutions Jack Buser told Axios that Stadia’s decline helped the company see a new vision for its future by helping others build their games.
“It was at that moment when we basically had to make decisions about Stadia that we realized that, at Google Cloud, we are at our best when we’re helping other people build this stuff, not necessarily building it ourselves,” Buser said.
“This stuff” Buser referred to is a collection of cloud-based services Google is selling to major publishers, including Ubisoft, Niantic, and Unity, and while that sounds almost identical to cloud-based solutions that Microsoft offers with Azure and Amazon recently began offering, Google is taking a different approach. Buser said Google's intent is to help manage and maintain live service games - those that are continuously updated, like Genshin Impact - and only live service games.
“Google is absolutely committed to games that are such a big part of our messaging,” Buser said. “When we made the decision with Stadia, we were just like, Look, we are committed to games as an industry.”
The bundle includes an analytics package to track player and game behavior, along with a data management program, and, crucially for live-service games, a server platform. Axios’ Stephen Totilo said Google positions its services as removing the risk of creating and hosting live-service games, and the tech giant hopes to attract new, high-profile clients during the 2023 Game Developers Conference.
