It is safe to say most modern people’s life revolves around Google. We rely on Google to get to places. We turn to Google for information. We get entertained by it too. The list just go on and on. Thank goodness that they have sold the robotic company to Softbank, if not we would be using Google robots in future too. Anywho, as if Google haven’t already overwhelm our day to day life, it now wants a piece of video gaming too with a new video game platform called Stadia.
So what the hell exactly is Stadia? Well, it is a cloud-based gaming platform that, if you ask me, is going to revolutionize the video game industry and inadvertently, instrumental to the demise of all other existing platforms, Playstation, Xbox or whatnot. I am not even kidding. I quite positive if Stadia takes off, it will be the end of all existing platforms as we know them. Stadia will allow games to play their favorite games on any type of screen, be it’s a TV, laptop, desktop, tablet or mobile phone, and seamlessly switch between devices and if Google have its way, in resolutions up to 4K (or even 8K in future) and at 60 frames per second with HDR and surround sound.
You know what is the real draw? The real draw here is, playing complex, graphics intensive games will not require you to own a high-end devices, ever. Because, Stadia will leverage on Google’s globally connected network of data centers and therefore, all you need is a device with a display and Internet connection. In fact, if we are not wrong, the plan is to have some form of direct connection to the platform. With Stadia, YouTube and YouTube Gaming will become somewhat useful to gamers.
According to Google, Stadia will allow you to get to tutorials/walkthroughs/guides available on YouTube in the midst of gaming and jump back right into the game at where you have left off. If you are watching a live stream of a video game, you can jump straight into the game without the need to download and/or install the game, and even live stream the game yourself. It is a very bold ambition and one that I imagined will require massive amount of resources on data centers.
“When players use Stadia, they’ll be able to access their games at all times, and on virtually any screen. And developers will have access to nearly unlimited resources to create the games they’ve always dreamed of. It’s a powerful hardware stack combining server class GPU, CPU, memory and storage, and with the power of Google’s data center infrastructure, Stadia can evolve as quickly as the imagination of game creators.”
Check the date. Stadia is not a joke. Google is pretty darn serious about revolutionizing the gaming industry. So serious that they even engineered a Stadia controller that, believe it or not, has direct connection to Google’s data center through WiFi for the “best possible gaming performance.” The controller is designed based on what gamers wanted in a controller and it includes a button to capture, save and share gameplay in up to 4K resolution and it has Google Assistant baked into it, with built-in microphone, of course, so you could call up Google Assistant to do things like checking out guides and walkthrough when you met with difficulties during the session, for example.
What Google is doing here is building an entire ecosystem that, if it succeeds, will see us becoming slaves to its services. So, lets not worry about SkyNet and worry more about how Google is taking over our life instead. But I am cool with “being slave to its services” as long the prices are reasonable. Stadia will be launching this year in countries including US, Canada, UK and Europe.
Images: Google.
