Comment by valas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by valas | Hacker News Reader

The article does not support the title. The facts also do not support the article.

Stadia launched with 3 indie games, one of them exclusive. In just the last week they added 3 more indie-ish games (Spitlings and 2 titles from SteamWorld). They also announced at least 4 more indie-ish titles to land soon (Lost Words, 2 more SteamWorld titles, and Stacks On Stacks). So how can one claim that indie developers are not porting games to Stadia? At least some clearly do.

Speaking of Business Insider - in my personal opinion, they are a click factory. They'll write anything that drives clicks, just look at their landing page. "Stadia is DoA" drives clicks and Business Insider wrote quite a few articles to that extent. They know how to run business.

Speaking of this specific article: if devs and 'executives' believe Google is not serious about Stadia, why no-one agreed to speak on record? Is it possible that that these contacts actually think there is a path forward for Stadia and they don't want to burn bridges? Or maybe these industry contacts are imaginary?

Disclaimer: happy Stadia user, playing indie games on it and confused when someone says that indies are not porting games to Stadia.

> if devs and 'executives' believe Google is not serious about Stadia, why no-one agreed to speak on record? Is it possible that that these contacts actually think there is a path forward for Stadia and they don't want to burn bridges?

They simply don't want to burn bridges with Google. There is nothing to win by doing so. Everyone knows Google has enough money to throw it against their problems if they decide to do so.

3 indie games is not exactly a lot. 3 indie games is what's launched on Steam any given 10 minutes. If you mean huge indie games, Steam gets about one or more of those a day.

And it seems like the Steamworld developer is quite serious about porting games to Stadia, since 4 games out of the 10 you mentioned are all related to Steamworld in some way. That doesn't strike me as a healthy indie market if it's so heavily sustained by one developer.

And announcing 4 more indie titles coming soon doesn't leave me with any confidence. It's not much.

I agree that the number of games compared to established platforms is small.

But what can you expect? This is a new entrant, all the new platforms faced similar issues. Some overcome it, some didn't, we'll see how it goes here. For what I know, Google already invested a lot and has deep pockets.

The facts seem to indicate that it's floundering if nearly half of its indie titles are from one minor developer. Indie devs often readily hop on new platforms (given that development isn't unreasonably difficult) since it's a wide open market and they have a fresh chance to get in before it's too crowded.

Nobody is eager to put anything on Stadia. As an indie developer myself, Stadia would at best be an afterthought long after I've comfortably released my games elsewhere. It doesn't seem worth the time investment.

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