Stadia has revealed quite a lot in just the past five days including when it plans to launch and what its associated costs will be for consumers. In addition to the monthly subscription fee of $9.99 it seems that Google may have struck deals with specific publishers to let them offer subscriptions on Stadia for a selection of all of their games on the platform.
This is according to Stadia lead Phill Harrison who spoke about the detail for the optional add-on during YouTube’s E3 Live on Sunday June 9. Since these will be subscriptions the cost would be stacked on top of the regular $9.99 cost for the Stadia Pro service though no prices were mentioned.
Not all publishers on the platform are going to have the same amount of games available, so it’s not clear if certain publisher subscriptions would cost more than others based on the number of games the player would have access to, though it’s more likely Google would only offer publisher subs once that particular publisher has a certain amount of games on the service.
Offering anything other than that could be seen as unfair from the subscribers perspective, and it wouldn’t make much sense to offer a subscription for a publisher that only has one or two games available even if there were plans to release more in the future.
Harrison noted that publishers may begin to start thinking about offering subscriptions for their games on the platform relatively soon, so it’s entirely possible that no additional subs on top of the Stadia Pro’s initial monthly cost will be offered just yet.
Publishers with the largest list of games could be the ones that jump on this opportunity before any of the others, but Google would also probably take into account which publishers are planning to bring future games to the platform as well and factor in how many there would be for planned upcoming titles.
For the time being it seems like there may not be any publishers that are lined up to offer subscriptions just yet, and even if there were it would only increase the cost of Stadia Pro which may already be a tough sell for many gamers.
It doesn’t appear that Harrison has plans for publisher-specific subscriptions to be offered on the Stadia Base model either, which means players would have subscribe to Pro first before they would be allowed to access any existing or future publisher options.
Stadia, which Google plans to launch in November, will mainly be set at the $9.99 a month to open up access to play games just about anywhere at the 4K resolution with the added benefit of the free games the service plans to offer “on a regular basis.
The first of these will be Destiny 2: The Collection, which will give players all of the content up to and including the upcoming expansion Shadowkeep if they purchase the Stadia Pro ‘Founder’s Edition’ bundle. Stadia will also let players buy any of the games individually, which will eventually be playable on Stadia Base, the service’s free option that launches sometime in 2020.