Google reportedly paid tens of millions for Stadia ports
Knowing he would need big titles to entice players to Stadia, Harrison's team reportedly spent more than the budget of some AAA games just to secure ports. While no exact numbers are given, according to several anonymous sources Schreier spoke to for the story, Google spent "tens of millions" of dollars for ports like Red Dead Redemption II or The Division 2 (Schreier clarified in a later Tweet that this was tens of millions of per port, not cumulative). Harrison also began building an in-house development team to create exclusive content for Stadia. Unfortunately, Stadia failed to catch on--according to Schreier's sources, it missed targets for controller sales and monthly active users by hundreds of thousands--which led to Google shutting down its internal game development studios on February 1st of this year.
NEW from me on the failure of Google Stadia:
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) February 26, 2021
- Missed initial sales targets by hundreds of thousands
- Tried to take on consoles rather than starting small
- To bring in games like Red Dead, Google spent astronomical sums (tens of millions *each*)
Story: https://t.co/po1Epj6NMj
Source (Bloomberg article behind a paywall)