Wouldn’t it be great if video game consoles went away and we could play games on any device? After all, the games — not the machines — are what we care about.

That is Google’s ambition with Stadia, the streaming game service that the company plans to release on Tuesday.

The product is not the hardware that we see in our homes. Instead, it’s Google’s data centers, which are handling the computing power to run games and to broadcast them to our smartphones, tablets and television sets over the internet. That’s unlike a traditional console, which plays games directly from the hardware.

The result: When we play games via Stadia, we are actually watching videos of the game streaming from Google’s servers. When we press a button, that command is sent to Google’s server to control whatever is happening in the game, which we then see in the video.