Google Stadia was first announced to the general public back in June during the E3 2019. At the same event, Google’s Chief Executive, Sundar Pichai mentioned Stadia terming it as “a game platform for everyone.” With Stadia all set to step into the world of cloud gaming in November 2019, Google will be the first big company to launch next-gen consoles, with Microsoft Project Scarlett and Sony’s PlayStation 5 lined up for launch next year. Interestingly, Google has even sold out the premium pre-order bundle for Google Stadia, called the Founder’s Edition in Europe. And now, as the cloud gaming service nears its launch, Google claims that Stadia multiplayer will be better than consoles.
The Director of Games at Google Stadia, Jack Buser recently took part in a Kinda Funny’s Youtube Podcast, reassuring viewers that Google Stadia Multiplayer offers a way better gaming experience than any current console could offer and all because of its ultra high bandwidth connection it plans to offer:
Another example we give is, if you take a Battle Royale game, you got like a hundred people playing. And basically your PC or your console is busy trying to coordinate with my PC and my console. And there’s 98 other PCs and consoles, and they’re trying to network them all together to make it look like there’s a hundred people running around the same battlefield, right. It’s a very tough engineering problem, which is why Battle Royale games are relatively new, it took awhile for us to figure out how do you synchronize a hundred different consoles and people’s living rooms with varying degrees of Internet connectivity all over the world. It’s tough. But with Stadia, it’s the world’s largest LAN party. Ultra high bandwidth and super, super stable connections between every person playing. ‘Is multiplayer going to be good on Stadia?’ Oh yeah, way better than what you could get out of a console. Because all of these cloud instances are all talking to each other with these very, very robust, high bandwidth pipes. You can imagine multiplayer worlds with like, forget hundreds, thousands of people all running around a playfield together all at the same time, all being rendered up on the screen.
Google Stadia launches in November with initial plans to be launched in United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Belgium and will expand further to other countries over time. Since Google Stadia is the first cloud gaming offering to the gaming world, it would be really interesting to see how it performs. Moreover, Microsoft’s Project XCloud is also up for beta testing next month.