Perhaps you haven’t heard the latest news about Stadia. That would be fair, considering that the platform’s been in crisis mode ever since its poor release and reception. And no, the news isn’t that Google’s pulled the plug on Stadia — but rather that the mega-corporation has shifted the platform’s business model so that studios are paid by how long they can keep players in their games.
According to an insider report from Axios, this shift to focusing on “engagement basis” as a metric for payment is freaking everyone out. [Engagement, wheee.] The problem according to this report? “The concern over engagement-based payments is that they incentivize developers to make games that are artificially longer or that pressure their players to keep coming back.”
Google now pays developers a portion of 70% of its Stadia Pro subscription fee by how many “moments of engagement” (i.e., times that a player has logged into a game) are racked up. For some types of games, this may work great, but for others it could prove a financial liability.
