The MMO programmer in me fantasizes about making yet another MAG-like (ps3-era shooter with upto 128 players) game. That kind of thing would be so much cleaner

The MMO programmer in me fantasizes about making yet another MAG-like (ps3-era shooter with upto 128 players) game. That kind of thing would be so much cleaner to do on a completely server-side platform. However, a large game like that would need a large budget to back it. Without Stadia being more popular I don't see anyone throwing all their eggs in that basket. Because it could only run on Stadia and nowhere else. One way to mitigate risk would have been to build for both Luna (Amazon) and Stadia. But neither are very popular, and one is Windows-only while the other is Linux-only. So my risk would actually double, not mitigate since I have to develop for two platforms. I'm ignoring xCloud since it's just a bunch of Xboxes and no thanks. For smaller, mid-size/indie studios which are not building a massively multiplayer game, I just don't see the up side of making a Stadia-only game. They wouldn't be trivially portable to other platforms and players have learnt to live with network latencies. So, unless a Google-owned studio does it, I don't see truly cloud-first multiplayer game happening. Assuming that's what you meant by "cloud first". OTOH Ubisoft does ship their games on Stadia and I'd be curious to know if the experience in, for example, The Division 2 is any better. Even if the game doesn't scale the number of players in an instance, they should still get some benefit of being on Stadia. It doesn't seem to be a very popular mode in the game's subreddit though.