Google has announced a new streaming game service named Google Stadia, at the Game Developers Conference, San Francisco. It has been shown that Google Stadi has the potential to run on all web connected devices, including low power ones such as Android phones and Chromecast devices, reported by Ars Technica.
Google will have complete control and ownership, running a selection of games on Google’s centralised servers via Google’s network of low-latency data centers. A new Google-produced controller has been presented, although games are playable on existing USB controllers and mouse-and-keyboards.
The keynote included Google’s pledge that its network infrastructure includes “7,500 edge nodes closer to players to provide better performance.” Stadia’s stacks at Google’s data centers are powered by AMD hardware, the company said, with “10.7 teraflops of power in each instance.”. Stadia will support “4K, 60 frames-per-second performance”. If you don’t have a 4K set to enjoy that gameplay with, Google says its capture button will save and stream your gameplay content at that resolution, should the game in question support it.”
It seems that there will be an option to request more or less infrastructure, but it’s currently unclear if this will cost developers money or impact the true functional ability. At the Game Developers Conference, changeable features through Google’s cloud infrastructure were emphasised. These included the ability to access intense physics systems, place thousands of cameras in various places in a game’s world, and reskin games with a huge variety of machine-generated images.
Sony’s PlayStation Now, Nvidia’s GeForce Now, and other similar services also run games on centralised servers and send the resulting video and audio over the Internet. It appears Google have decided to take advantage of this growing market, and to enter it with their extremely large and powerful and infrastructure. This shows the power of centralised cloud computing as a service rather than relying on running things on a specific device. Although it’s important to note that users will need access to reliable and fast internet connections in order to make best use of this service.