After spending billions over the last few years to upgrade its cloud computing infrastructure, Google thinks it is ready to tackle the needs of some of the most demanding customers on the planet. Google announced the launch of Stadia Tuesday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco…
After spending billions over the last few years to upgrade its cloud computing infrastructure, Google thinks it is ready to tackle the needs of some of the most demanding customers on the planet.
Google announced the launch of Stadia Tuesday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, promising that it would ship a game-streaming service powered by its massive computing network that works across mobile devices, PCs, and televisions by the end of the year. One of the biggest factors that will dictate the success or failure of Stadia will be the number of times users abandon those games in frustration after encountering glitches, crashes, or delays that have plagued earlier attempts at video-game streaming.
“This architecture is the foundation for the new generation of gaming,” said Majd Bakar, vice president at Google and head of engineering for Stadia, during the presentation.
Google is hardly the first company to pursue video-game streaming, but it will be the first of the big three cloud companies to ship a service designed to stream the most demanding console games, assuming everything remains on course. Microsoft plans to start public trials of its Project xCloud service later this year, and while Amazon Web Services provides a lot of back-end cloud services to game developers, it doesn’t have a consumer-facing service that is capable of streaming top-tier console games like Assassin’s Creed or Doom to browsers.
