GOOGLE STADIA: What is it, How it works & Is There a Chance of success

GOOGLE STADIA: What is it, How it works & Is There a Chance of success: In mid-March, at the Game Developer Conference 2019 held in San Francisco, Google introduced a streaming service called Google Stadia, but it will not broadcast movies and TV shows, but games. Last year, the search giant unceremoniously launched a beta test of the service, however, it was then called Project Stream. Now is the time for a full-fledged announcement, which revealed to us a lot of details about Stadia, and, according to the creators, their brainchild will turn the gaming industry upside down.

What do they promise?

If you thought Stadia was just another clone of Twitch or the recently defunct YouTube Gaming, you are wrong. Google intends not only to demonstrate the gameplay of famous streamers and bloggers, but to provide you with full-fledged gameplay without the need to install games on your console or PC. Moreover, to start playing, you do not need to have a powerful computer or set-top box, the user will not even need to install a separate application, it will be enough to have a device with Chromecast support, that is, a smartphone, tablet, low-power office PC or TV on Android TV – in short, literally everything where there is a screen.

Apparently, Google took the issue very seriously, since it hired some of the most experienced people in the gaming industry (in particular, the development of Stadia was headed by the vice president of the company Phil Harrison, better known as a man who had worked at both Microsoft and Sony). and 7,500 data centers scattered around the world will be responsible for processing huge flows of information. To ensure sufficient computing power, Google has already contracted with AMD to supply server graphics cards with a performance of 10.7 teraflops each, which is more than the power of the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro combined. There are no perfect products, so let’s take a look at the pros and cons of Google Stadia from the perspective of the average gamer.

Benefits & Saving

The first, and perhaps the most important advantage of streaming games is the absence of the need to invest in expensive hardware, update it and generally worry about the performance of their gaming platforms. Modern gaming computers cost tens and even hundreds of thousands of rubles, it is not surprising that according to Steam , only about 10% of users can play modern games with maximum graphics settings.

Cross-platform

Today, PC users have to use emulators to run console games (and even then, most of them are far from the most recent projects), but the owners of consoles do not even have such an opportunity, they are limited only to games created exclusively for a specific platform. If Google allows you to play projects from all existing platforms on the device that suits you, the problem will disappear by itself. Have a smartphone, but not enough a couple of thousand dollars for a powerful computer? Not a problem, take your phone and are touched by the beauty of explosions in the conventional Battlefield V, or without getting up from the couch you drive into the sunset on a sports car from Forza Horizon 4. In a word, no one is holding anyone back, the main thing is that the players are satisfied.

Graphics for every taste

Already during the presentation, it was announced from the stage about support for all popular game engines, including Unreal Engine, Unity, Havok and CryEngine.

Brand new multiplayer games

Google promises much more stable gameplay in multiplayer projects, since both the client and the server will be in the same place. In addition to the absence of bugs in multiplayer, a unified technical base will allow placing thousands of players on one map in the super popular “royal battles”, realizing full destructibility in the spirit of Crackdown 3, as well as getting rid of cheaters and hackers.

Instant downloads

With cloud computing, the user does not need to wait for the end of tedious downloads, all transitions from the menu to the gameplay occur in a maximum of a couple of seconds, and even then, if such a mini-pause was provided by the developer of a particular game to preserve the atmosphere.

More free space on your computer

Along with the on-demand business model, there is no need to keep large amounts of game data on your computer in order to run it here and now, at any time. Modern AAA projects take tens of gigabytes after installation, which causes a lot of inconvenience and limits the user in terms of the number of games installed simultaneously. This implies another plus – if before you had to regularly update yourself by downloading heavy patches and DLC, then you don’t need to do this with cloud games – the end player doesn’t care what happens somewhere on the server, the main thing is that everything works well.