Google Announces Stadia Cloud Gaming Platform

The future of gaming is not a box. It's a place. One place for all the ways we play. Welcome to Stadia, an all-new gaming platform from Google for playing AAA video games across all the screens in your life. Gather around.

Sign up to stay tuned at stadia.com.

 

No info on price yet or full games lineup but it's coming this year to Chrome Browser, Mobile and Chromecast. They also announced a controller for the service that connects directly to your router via wifi and then talks to the server itself, this ensures every device is compatible with the controller since you are connecting to the game, not the device you're using. It will also support existing controllers, keyboards and mice but during the press conference only mentioned it working with PC.

Perhaps the most interesting part aside from the unique controller is they hope to get publishers to offer demos for games that they can then offer directly on YouTube pages. So, your watching the latest Assassin's Creed Odyssey trailer and think, wow this is cool and then can click a button and be playing in "as little as 5 seconds", allows you to get a taste of the game without a huge download. I think ultimately that is one of the best use cases for cloud gaming.

None of this is new, Google has said a lot of the same things as all the cloud gaming services before it and even promising a lot of the same features, perks etc. That said, Google has something none of the previous attempts had, billions of dollars and a massive pre-built infrastructure. If anyone can succeed, it'd probably be them... unless they get bored and kill it off in a few years like so many Google projects before it. :/

 

It's definitely gonna be on my mind going into this. I can't say I have confidence to buy any games on the service until it's proven success unless they come with alternative ways to play... like say an Ubisoft game purchase would also get you the game on uPlay. I did the OnLive thing and when the cloud service goes up in smoke so does all the games you purchased. Games are too expensive for that.

Price is definitely gonna be a major factor. I'm very interested to see what model they go with and what it all works out too. An the great thing is xCloud from Microsoft is also right around the corner, Nvidia's Geforce Now has been in beta forever too. Which will hopefully keep them all pushing features, pricing etc.