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There’s so much to say about Stadia that we’re taking a day or two to absorb all the info and catch our collective breath. Right now, you just need to know that Google is launching an all-out effort to become a major player in the multi-billion dollar gaming industry via a streaming game service and platform called Stadia.
This won’t just be a place to stream games from: it will be an entire platform meant for developers to build games specifically for. Think of platforms like Playstation, XBOX and PC. Google has created a similar thing but with the massive scale of Google’s servers and infrastructure. According to Google, the web is your platform, not a box in your livingroom.
The craziest part of all this is the availability across devices since the web is the platform. With Chrome installed, you can call up and play any game on Stadia instantly without need for download, installation, or updates. With a simple link and URL, you can launch into a game experience immediately. Imagine the possibilities of being able to deliver and leverage AAA titles in seconds right on the web. Google showed this running on weak Windows devices, Chromebooks, phones, and a Chromecast.
Yes, a freaking Chromecast!
They’ve additionally announced a controller that is built just for the service that connects to your WIFI and communicates directly with Google’s Stadia servers and simply skips your current device as a middleman. This should serve to cut down on latency quite a bit. Along with these benefits, also imagine playing games with people online where everyone is on the same, strong, connected server. Forget 100 player battle royale: we’re talking thousands in a room with no drop in performance.
All this is to skim right over all the YouTube tie-ins that were announced for the billions of people who watch gamers online. The new ways that content creators will be able to interact and engage their audiences is breathtaking. We’ll be covering this and more in the coming days.
These are really only surface-level observations from today’s event and, if you have about an hour, I firmly recommend you watch the entire keynote (embedded below) to see all Google is doing with Stadia. If they can properly tackle the problem of latency that no game streaming service has done fully to this point, it is feasible that Google may in fact change the landscape of gaming when Stadia launches later in 2019.
