Google to launch multiple game studios for Stadia exclusives, but 'huge new IP' still several years out

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Expect exclusives every year, starting soon.

(Image credit: Stadia)

Google is planning to create "a few different first-party studios" to make exclusive games for Google Stadia—but don't expect any blockbusters for a long time. 

Google's studios will release exclusive games every year starting within the next four years, but it may be "several years" before we see a "huge new IP", Google's head of Stadia games & entertainment Jade Raymond told GamesIndustry.biz.

"We have a plan that includes building out a few different first-party studios, and also building up the publishing org to ship exclusive content created by indie devs and other external partners," she said. "It is a long-term view that Google is taking. For a big bet and a huge new IP that's going to fully leverage the cloud, it may be several years."

"But we do have quite a few exclusive games in the works that will demonstrate some of the exciting things about the platform all along the path. It won't be four years before gamers get to see the new exclusive, exciting content. There will be some coming out every year, and more and more each year."

For exclusives, Google will focus on games "that wouldn't be possible on any other platform", Raymond said. They include detailed cloud-based physics simulations, more advanced AI behavior, or having Google's AI's control NPCs to respond to player actions.

The first first-party Google studio will be based in Montreal, the company announced this week.

The Stadia Founder's Edition is launching on November 19. For a list of all gaems announced for Stadia, click here.

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.