Requiring Developers to use libraries could hamper the ability to effectively utilize the hardware. By allowing direct access to stadia hardware ensures that developers could utilize stadia at its fullest while allowing the devs to develop stadia using their preferred method.
Hi @els1,
Based on the somewhat-limited information available at https://stadia.dev/about/, it sounds to me like developers would use various APIs included in the Stadia SDK rather than interacting with the underlying hardware directly. This would also allow the Stadia hardware to be upgraded without any impact to existing games.
Are they forced to use these APIs in order to develop stadia, or can they make their own apis.
@els1 APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are used to let one thing talk to another thing. A Stadia game doesn't have direct access to the underlying hardware, so it talks to Stadia API which tells the hardware to do a thing. There wouldn't be any reason for a game developer to write their own API for use on Stadia... it wouldn't have anything to talk to.
Like @BinaryJay mentioned, games don't really get raw hardware access anymore anyway, on any platform. There's always an abstraction layer (or several!) below the game's code. Sure, in theory, a brilliant developer could wrangle the absolute best performance out of a system if they're able to interface with the hardware directly... but a small mistake could have catastrophic (fiery) consequences.
And that performance would only be possible on a single fixed system. You wouldn't be able to move the code to another platform without a complete rewrite. Allowing that kind of hardware access would prevent the Stadia hardware from ever being able to change. Even just moving to a different server with a slightly different configuration would break all the existing games.
Using a platform's APIs and hardware abstraction layers instead makes games easier to develop and more stable, and enables the platform provider to improve the underlying hardware without any negative impacts to the existing games.
Just about every game, on every platform, is made using various middleware and engines that abstract the hardware. Stadia is no different.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at with these posts, honestly.
Well PS2 devs had complete access to Hardware, and they could do all kinds of awesome stuff with them. Also, every game console up to Super Nintendo had their games written down to the metal with assembly in order to maximize the hardware power. Could stadia devs do the same?