In a recent investor call, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot assured investors that porting games to Google Stadia isn't as costly a job as it may seem.
"The extra cost to put to make sure the games work well on Stadia is not that high," Guillemot said, according to a report by Gamasutra (opens in new tab). "It's part now of our pipelines and we have a good relationship with Stadia to make sure it is profitable for us."
The technical details of Google's upcoming game streaming platform have been murky since its reveal. I previously assumed that Stadia would essentially stream the same PC version I could download elsewhere, but the process is more involved.
As Gamasutra points out, Ubisoft's smooth operation might be a special case here. The company was an early partner with Google on Stadia. Last year, some players got to try out a prototype version of Stadia (then called Project Stream) with a free copy of Assassin's Creed Odyssey (opens in new tab).
It's reasonable to assume that a Stadia port would generally be a lighter workload than, say, a console port if a PC version already exists. At the very least, you don't have to worry about overworking Stadia's maxed-out machines running the game. Though challenges unique to streaming could present new considerations for ports in the future, like input delay in multiplayer games.
