Stadia boss has hilariously bad take on live streams

Streamers should be paying developers to feature their content, according to Google Stadia’s creative director Alan Hutchinson.

“Streamers worried about getting their content pulled because they used music they didn’t pay for should be more worried that by the fact that they’ve played games they didn’t pay for as well,” Hutchinson said in a tweet posted on October 22nd. He then went on to suggest that streamers should be buying a license like a “real business” for the content that they use.

People in the comments were quick to point on that streamers aren’t stealing content, and in fact a lot of developers and publishers actually pay popular channels to feature their games. Streaming has become a major source of advertising for the games industry over the last decade.

Fred Wood, who has worked with Vlambeer, chimed in calling this one of the most out-of-touch takes he’s ever seen from someone in the industry. “Clearly you don’t see the value streamers provide to developers, and I’m saying this as a dev,” he posted. Wood goes on to point out the irony behind the comments, given that one of Stadia’s core advertised features is the ability to quickly and easily live stream gameplay to YouTube.

Stadia has struggled to find a foothold in the marketplace since launching late last year. So perhaps some of Hutchinson’s comments could be born from that frustration, but it is a hilariously bad take for someone in the games industry. Especially when streaming has become a major component of every major game platform, and every major game. Many titles, especially smaller ones like Among Us, have found a huge audience through streaming. One which they never would have gotten through conventional marketing.

Even Nintendo, the lone holdout, walked back on their ludicrous streaming restrictions two years ago. Their new rules state that as long as the work is transformative (adds commentary, which is a basic component of live streams), then they have no problem with people featuring their games.

There was a time when I used to think you needed to be in the top percentile of intelligence to work at Google. Now I see it’s just stacked with a bunch of clueless yokels, just like every other big business out there. Perhaps this is the reason why Stadia is failing.