Fri. Mar 29th, 2024
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The recent Gamers Development Conference (GDC), San Francisco saw the launch of Google Stadia, a cloud gaming service which allows gaming anywhere you have a data connection, streaming console-level titles from one of Google’s massive and responsive data centres, all without the need for dedicated hardware. On stage, executives showed off streaming “Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey” across an Android phone, Chromecast TV, and “the least powerful PC” Google said it was able to buy. .

Development:

Project Stream was Google’s first innitiative towards video gaming products. The company had previously been rumored as working on a service called Project Yeti since at least 2016. Google had also hired gaming industry executive Phil Harrison and was seen recruiting developers during industry events in 2018. Project Stream’s main differentiator from past services, such as OnLive, GeForce Now, and PlayStation Now, is its ability to run in any desktop Chrome browser, rather than specific gaming platforms. The service uses AMD Radeon graphics hardware. Google announced the service in October 2018 and soon after, opened invitations to beta testers with access to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Players could apply for access and those who met an Internet speed minimum could run the game in their Chrome browsers. Those who participated received a free copy of the game when the beta expired. Stadia was formally announced during Google’s keynote address at the 2019 Game Developers Conference in March 2019. To support Stadia, Google also announced the formation of Stadia Games and Entertainment, with Jade Raymond as its lead. Besides developing their own games, Stadia Games and Entertainment will help support the transition of third-party titles to the Stadia service.

As of now three games are set to be launched on Stadia:

List of games to be released on Stadia
Title Genre(s) Developer(s) Publisher(s) Release date
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Action Ubisoft Quebec Ubisoft TBA
Doom Eternal First-person shooter id Software Bethesda Softworks TBA

Assassin’s Creed Odeyssey and Doom Eternal areboth planned to be launched with 4K resolution, 60 frames/secs gameplay and HDR support. An unannounced third game being developed by Q-Games will utilise the platform’s “state share” feature.

Key Features:

When Google announced its custom streaming Stadia solution, it made it clear that it had partnered with AMD to deploy a custom GPU with 10.7 TFLOPs of compute power and 8GB of HBM2 RAM. There was no mention of the CPU used, but a note in Google’s presentation referenced Hyper-Threading technology — not SMT. It is capable of streaming video games in 4K resolution at 60 frames per second, with support for high-dynamic-range, to players via the company’s numerous data centers across the globe. It will be accessible through the company’s Google Chrome web browser.

Compitetiors:

It’s not clear why Google played coy regarding its hardware partners at the initial Stadia launch. The company may have been finalizing partner details down to the wire, or be trying to avoid a discussion of specs and performance in favor of marketing the idea of Stadia as a service right now. Some tech companies prefer not to disclose their hardware specs at all. Both Apple and Microsoft refuse to name the model numbers of the CPUs they ship in their own hardware, as if obfuscating important information represents some kind of good. It’s also possible that Google intends to deploy both AMD and Intel hardware as it sees fit, and doesn’t want to deal with customers who think variance in performance is somehow related to whether they are using an “Intel” instance or an “AMD” instance for their game streaming. There are also concerns about what we’d lose with Stadia — a game service that essentially locks all game code away, preventing modding and exploration, and with some significant implications for video game history preservation. Even if you firmly believe in streaming, it’s not clear that Google is going to be the company to break into this space when facing off against the likes of Sony, Microsoft, and Nvidia, all of whom have more direct experience in the space or build custom hardware to enable it.

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