Google's Stadia is The Future of Gaming but There's Still Something Missing

The Reveal

Last week, Google held a keynote at Game Developers Conference in San Francisco for the very first time. It’s unbelievable. I only wrote my article on the future of gaming a few days ago, stating in it, cloud gaming was the future but one that may still be a bit far from reach. Google broke right through that barrier. They announced Stadia, a platform for cloud gaming accessible through Youtube and Chrome and Stadia Games and Entertainment, Google’s debut game studio. Exciting stuff.

Here’s a quick recap for those of you who have no clue what Stadia or cloud gaming is.

The Recap

Cloud gaming is a way to bring high quality, graphically intense, AAA games to your devices. Your smartphone, laptop, smart TV and tablets. What’s so groundbreaking?

Didn’t catch it yet?

Cloud gaming requires no console. It’s a sort of streaming system, meaning all the game data is stored on Google’s servers and then information is sent back and forth from the server to the player’s device in real time. Think interactive Netflix’s Black Mirror Bandersnatch but for games.

Cloud gaming makes it possible to play these super high-quality games on smaller and outdated devices. In addition, no extra hardware is needed, including the game itself. Stadia runs games with the click of a link and players are in control with their keyboard or touchscreen. It’s so easy. All you do is see a game trailer on Youtube and simply click “play” to launch the game directly on your viewing screen, whether that’s your phone, tablet, laptop or TV.

The Google team showed us that not could these games be played on your existing devices, but also that these games could be played seamlessly from one device to another. Imagine this. You start playing a game on your phone and realize you want a bigger screen. All you have to do is hop on over to your tablet or laptop and continue playing the game right from where you left off on your phone. Cloud gaming is putting us gamers on cloud 9.

Stadia’s mission is to make gaming more easily accessible to developers, players, and observers all over the world. Gamers no longer have to go out and buy expensive consoles, they can use what they already have.

As for developers, their game development world is supposed to be widened with Stadia. Google claims that on the Stadia platform, because they are also not confined by console limitations, developers’ imaginations will run wild and free. Ironically, at the moment access to Stadia development is application only.

Nonetheless, they’ve already partnered with powerhouse game engines, Unity and Unreal, along with many other popular middlewares to make the switch easy for game developers. Their AI has the ability to overlay any combination of art styles on to an in-game world to make the switch easy for game designers.

Erin Hoffman-John, Stadia’s lead designer for research and development, gave us a further peek into how gorgeous and interactive worlds within Stadia can be. They partnered with Tangent games to create a multiplayer world with a totally destructible environment. She also shared how Stadia is bringing back split-screen couch co-op through its stream connect feature, empowering squad-based gaming through dynamic split screen streaming.  

Stadia Game Graphics with Totally Destructible World using Real Time Rigid Body Physics - Source: Youtube

Google is banking on the power of social media, community building, and video sharing, it seems. The big push of the whole keynote seemed to be games playable in 4k HDR at 60fps and playable through Youtube. They even had MatPat of the 11+ million subscriber channel The Game Theorists hype up the crowd about how Stadia works through Youtube.

Youtube has a huge gaming community. As Head of Gaming at Youtube, Ryan Wyatt,  boasted, more than 200 million gamers come to Youtube every day and more than 50 billion hours gaming content watched on Youtube in 2018 alone. That’s enough hours to walk to Pluto and back...more than a dozen times. So yes, it is absolutely the perfect place to host a cloud gaming platform. And if Google pulls this off, the gaming landscape will be forever changed. Or at least Youtube will have been propelled into a whole new level of social media, considering the infinite multiplayer and challenge building/sharing features Stadia comes with.

I’ll put the recorded presentation at the end of this article for anyone who’s interested in watching the keynote for themselves and getting into all the details.

The Missing Pieces

Aside from all the excitement, Google’s keynote felt a little Ted Talky: all talk and no walk. There were so many important aspects missing from the keynote, you could feel the anxious suspense building up in the room. First off, how much does all of this cost? No costs were revealed at all. Not for the developers and certainly not for the players. As developers, we still have no clue how much financial resource it’s going to take to develop and build games for Stadia. As players, we are in the dark. Will Stadia be a subscription-based model? Can people own cloud-based games? Secondly, a definite release date was not revealed. Later this year they said. We’re in this waiting game together

The Controller

Before I forget, there is a state of the art Stadia controller equipped with your regular joystick configuration and with your not so regular game capture and Google Assistant buttons. The game capture button allows players to save and share their gameplay directly to themselves, to friends, or to the entire Youtube community. The Google Assistance button is like, no not like. It is the new cheat book, game guide, whatever you want to call it. When your stuck on a level of Assassin’s Creed or Doom, just press the Google Assistant button, ask the Assistant how to beat the level and you get your answer, via Youtube video of course, right on your screen where you’ve been playing. I think that’s pretty cool.

The showcase version also came with its very own Konami code sequence, an ode to the olden ways.

Stadia Controller - Source: Stadia

The Wait

So now we wait for that later this year release.

And as Google puts it,

“the future of gaming is not a box, it’s a place”

Hope to see you there.

PS: Want to chat about Stadia?

Join The Stadia Community group on LinkedIn: https://www.dhirubhai.net/groups/8764473/

#stadia #futureofgaming #gdc2019 #cloudgaming