Google takes aim at the home console market with its streaming service, Google Stadia.
Google takes aim at the home console market with its streaming service, Google Stadia.
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Google takes aim at the home console market with its streaming service, Google Stadia.
This morning – well, this afternoon in Europe – at the Game Developer’s Conference, in a typically slick presentation, Google CEO Sundar Pinchai introduced the world to Google Stadia. It might sound like a silly name, but it’s called Stadia after the human compulsion to come together to play together. You know, football, basketball, rounders, feeding Christians to lions, volleyball – classic stadia-based activities.
Following their public beta test last autumn, where US players got to take on Assassin’s Creed Odyssey via their Chrome browser, Google has moved ‘Project Stream’ – as it was called – from a concept to reality, now Google Stadia.
During the beta, testers could play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey at 1080p resolution and 60 frames per second. In today’s Stadia reveal, it was announced that the service will support 4K, 60 frames per second, with 8K, 120 frames per second in the works to support the next generation of super high-resolution panels coming to market. Stadia will also support HDR and surround sound.
You’ll also be able to stream Google Stadia to pretty much any device you can think of, including laptops, tablets, mobile phones, and TVs (with a Chromecast-alike dongle). Support for streaming to other consoles is to be confirmed, though presumably, that’s in the hands of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, not Google.
Stadia will be available with a custom controller, in three pretty colours, but you can play with any controller (or indeed keyboard and mouse) that you have lying around.
All of this is powered by a custom AMD GPU and custom-built hardware specific for the project.
