Google hosted its Google for Games Developer Summit keynote today, a presentation meant to replace some of the announcements it would have made at the canceled GDC event. One of the more notable announcements at the event was that of Stadia Makers, a new program meant to help independent developers bring their games over to the platform.
Google is partnering with Unity to kickstart the program, so if you want to be part of the program, you'll need to be using Unity version 2019.3 or later, at least for now. Google is also mostly looking for games releasing in 2020 or 2021 at this time.
As for what you get, the Stadia Makers program has a number of benefits. For one thing, you'll get technical assistance from experts at Unity in order to meet certain targets. Stadia Makers can also get free access to developer kits, including up to five physical kits depending on the team's size and structure. Finally, Google will help developers offset some of the costs of developing a game, though the company wasn't very specific regarding how much of those costs will be covered.
On a separate note, developers building multiplayer games (not just for Stadia) can use Google Cloud's Game Servers feature to deliver those experiences. Game Servers is based on Agones, a game server hosting platform built on Kubernetes, but it's meant for global experiences instead of regional-based servers.
If you're interested, you can apply for the Stadia Makers program here. If you're interested in Game Servers, you can learn more about how to get started here.
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