It’s no secret that Google is looking to boost the number of games it has to offer on Stadia, and today, at the Google for Games Developer Summit, the company announced a new Stadia Makers program to expand self-publishing opportunities for independent developers on the game streaming platform.
Google’s announcement highlights three key benefits of the program, which is being run in partnership with Unity: technical assistance from the Unity team, up to five physical development kits (depending on how big your dev team is), and a promise that Google will help provide funding to “offset” some of the costs of developing for another platform.
Right now, the program is open to developers who are building games on Unity 2019.3 or later, are planning to release their game in either 2020 or 2021, and are willing to commit to offering Stadia support at launch.
Google’s announcement says that the program will “start small” for now but will “expand to pave the way for development teams of all sizes to bring their titles to Stadia” over time. Interested developers can apply here.