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Stadia announces new revenue schemes to try and tempt more developers

Payouts for recurring play of Pro games, or for converting customers to subscribers.

Google Stadia has announced a series of new schemes designed to encourage more developers to its cloud-based streaming platform.

Several of these plans, such as a share of revenue from Stadia's Pro subscription service and payouts for converting Stadia customers to Pro subscribers, seem directly aimed at boosting its paid membership offering.

For individual games, there's a new 85 percent revenue split for titles sold after 1st October up until the end of 2023, and up until the first $3m earned. This is similar to both Google and Apple's app store policies, which also take just 15 percent of the revenue cut compared to the industry standard 30 percent, up to a certain threshold.

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Stadia will now share 70 percent of its Stadia Pro revenue - whatever that may be - with developers whose games are added to the service's catalogue from now on. Payouts will be made per "session day", meaning per calendar day a particular user boots up a particular game.

Google will also pay out a flat $10 for every player who goes on to subscribe to Pro after clicking on a developer's "Click to Play" affiliate link - although it will only pay out after a game has accrued at least $500 via this method.

All of these ideas were announced last night in a new Stadia Keynote for developers, which you can watch below. In it, Google says it focused on "delivering the vision" in 2020, and trumpets the fact Stadia was a solid place to play Cyberpunk 2077 (unlike on some other consoles).

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Last month, Stadia finally added Chromecast with Google TV support and, in May, Stadia told our sister site GamesIndustry.biz that it was "alive and well".

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