Google Stadia - Is Cloud Gaming For Real? - Extra Credits

stream stream stream stream stream oh hey everyone as many of you might have heard Google announced stadia their entry into the game Market at GDC this year but it's totally unlike what anyone else is doing in the game Space so what is it is it going to work and if it does what's it going to do to games [Music] so what is stadia well it's a 100% streaming game service this means that whatever games you play aren't actually being processed on your console or PC and all the heavy Computing is actually happening on Google machines in data centers somewhere nearby and then essentially a video of the game you're playing is streamed back to your screen much in the way you'd stream a video on YouTube or Netflix and in a lot of ways this is pretty incredible it means that if you have any device that can take

inputs from a controller and send them out over the internet you can play any game that stadia will run at high resolution and solid frame rate the dream is that you could play any game literally any game on your phone and then if you happen to be near a TV or a computer monitor just put your phone down in front of it and keep playing the same game at high resolution on a giant 4K screen and I'm not going to lie that all sounds pretty awesome no expensive Hardware to buy no updating your PC every few years and no having to lament leaving your console behind when you fly home for the holidays or end up traveling for work but is it really going to work I would say that's a big maybe because Google isn't the first group to try this a company called onli tried it years ago and ended up being a black hole for a lot of VC funding another company called Guai also tried it was bought by PlayStation and ended up becoming PlayStation now which wasn't the most let's say successful of Sony's offerings

so what are the problems with this idea you may ask well one of the biggest is latency every time you press a button it will have to be sent out to a server processed and then the result has to be sent back to you and if you're one of those people who hates playing action games at any less than 60 FPS just imagine having a tenth of a second between every button press and when it actually registers that won't feel good and that of course is compounded even further in a multiplayer environment this has basically killed all previous attempts at streaming games but how do you mitigate that by having data centers everywhere so no one's more than a few miles away from the machines that are actually processing their games and quick quiz here what's the one thing Google has a lot of well yeah that too but what I was getting at is Data Centers there are maybe a few dozen companies in the world that has the infrastructure to possibly pull this off Amazon maybe Facebook and a handful of others and Google is certainly one of them so is it going to

work maybe because as long as there's Comcast and other companies like it this promise is still pretty dicey I mean imagine you're playing Dark Souls and your friendly local ISP decides to hiccup if you thought the lag that happens when you drop below 30 FPS was irritating immersion breaking and kills the pace of your play then let me tell you you're going to love that 30 seconds where your screen goes blank while your character is getting killed on a server somewhere else because your internet did a Comcast but there's also the question of content Google doesn't have the greatest track record as a content creator and at times it's struggled with working with external content creators so if no one ends up putting stuff on stadia well then the whole thing's kind of mood anyway okay but enough of the naysaying let's look at the possible upside besides having access to games anywhere the biggest benefit we see is being able to play anything on any device at any time but not necessarily for the reasons

you might think gaming is still inaccessibly expensive to hundreds of millions of potential players in parts of Latin America Africa India and many other places across the world if people could play on devices they already owned even low-end smartphones it brings a lot of new exciting voices into our community of course this all does still depend on internet access and how Google's going to handle places that have data caps or pay by the megabit internet but truthfully they're going to have to address that to make this really even work in the US and while I'm sure there's some discussions about that going on with companies we're not privy to them another possible awesome thing that they're talking about is the YouTube integration this idea that you could be watching your favorite let's player blazing through some game on YouTube and if you think to yourself that's pretty cool I want to be playing that all you have to do is click on the video and bang you're playing that game right there right then no download needed but this to also brings some dangers for instance how modding is

going to work remains an open question will Google add a library of mods to their server for the most popular games if so what happens to the rest of them who knows plus there's questions of ownership questions of preservation and questions of what it's going to do to development after all do you target stadia server Hardware as you're building or do you still Target PC or console specs but to me the biggest question is one of privacy yes Zoe I know you brought it up before Google's business is data aggregating data is what they do and this isn't necessarily a bad thing as it helps them streamline Services we use all the time and even in game design we pull tons of metrics that when used well are a huge help in refining and improving our games but make no mistake Google is absolutely going to be tracking things and pulling data above and beyond whatever your games are already grabbing this might be totally fine but we're going to have to hear a whole lot more of exactly what stadia will be tracking before I'm

completely comfortable with the idea of the service so in the end there's a ton of potential for stadia it can open up high-end gaming to a huge amount of people who were simply priced out of it before it can make games more portable and more convenient and it might even help us standardize development a bit but even though all of those things sound amazing that doesn't mean that it's not going to come with some risk if anyone can pull it off though it's Google even if that's still a pretty big if nah [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]