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Google Debuts Video Games Streaming Service Stadia (polygon.com)

Posted by msmash on from the pushing-the-limits dept.

Google today launched its Stadia cloud gaming service at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. From a report: Stadia is not a dedicated console or set-top box. The platform will be accessible on a variety of platforms: browsers, computers, TVs, and mobile devices. In an onstage demonstration of Stadia, Google showed someone playing a game on a Chromebook, then playing it on a phone, then immediately playing it on PC -- a low-end PC, no less --, picking up where the game left off in real time. Stadia will be powered by Google's worldwide data centers, which live in more than 200 countries and territories, streamed over hundreds of millions of miles of fiber optic cable, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said.

Phil Harrison, previously at PlayStation and Xbox, now at Google, said the company will give developers access to its data centers to bring games to Stadia. Harrison said that players will be able to access and play Stadia games, like Assassin's Creed Odyssey, within seconds. Harrison showed a YouTube video of Odyssey featuring a "Play" button that would offer near-instant access to the game. Pichai announced the new platform at the Game Developers Conference, saying that Google want to build a gaming platform for everyone, and break down barriers to access for high-end games. Users will be able to move from YouTube directly into gameplay without any downloads. Google says this can be done in as little as 5 seconds. At launch, Stadia will stream games at 4k resolution, but Google claimed in the future it will be able to stream at a video quality of 8k. The company says it will launch the service later this year in the U.S. and UK.

4 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Why would anyone use this? by gatzke · · Score: 4, Insightful

    After all that Google has abandoned over the years, why would anyone trust them for anything?

    The big ones I think of are:
    Reader
    Wave
    Picasa
    Google+

    I love google docs, android, and gmail but I would not be surprised to see them get dropped as well.

    1. Re:Why would anyone use this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Every company abandons products that don't work out. How many pieces of software has Microsoft abandoned. Someone even created a wikipedia article for it!
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Microsoft_software

      I love google docs, android, and gmail but I would not be surprised to see them get dropped as well.

      Are you kidding? It's about as likely as Microsoft suddenly dropping Office. These are the main products of Google after search.

      It's a risk to be sure. But so was the X-Box when it first came out.

  2. Streaming-Only Game Releases by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm not looking forward to the wave of streaming-only game releases that will occur as a result of Stadia and any future lookalike services. Some quick problems off the top of my head:

    - When nobody owns copies of the game, the publisher can remove them for good if they fail to turn a profit.
    - Potential modding scenes for these games will never materialize.

  3. Streaming Video by crow · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I can't be sure from the article, but it looks like this is a different approach to gaming. Normally the code and data for the games is sent to your device, and then your device runs the game logic, renders the graphics, and outputs the video and sound, sending data to central servers for multiplayer gaming. This service takes data from your controller, sends it over the network to a server, runs all the logic and rendering there, then streams the video and sound back to your device.

    This is a radical change that has lots of serious implications if it catches on.

    • Your local CPU is no longer important
    • Your local GPU is no longer important
    • Your local OS is no longer important
    • Network latency is much more important
    • Network bandwidth caps are very limiting

    I expect Google will be able to encode the game video in a number of different formats, enabling streaming to many different devices. Doing this in real time is a nice trick. Eventually they should be able to support multi-monitor setups and other interesting configurations.