Google

For the games industry, Google Stadia is both an exciting opportunity and a looming crisis. It’s exciting because in the blink of an eye Google will remove almost all barriers to entry in gaming and allow anyone to play any game on any device. That’s huge. But it’s a looming crisis because this is Google. And Google runs YouTube. It’s an almighty crisitunity.

Right now, Google Stadia isn’t really anything other than a bold, technically impressive demo. And boy is it impressive. But caveats abound. In the stop-start history of games streaming – and let’s face it, it’s mostly been stop – we’ve been here before. But Stadia is tantalisingly different: it’s an ambitious bid to create a single platform for gaming and fundamentally change the entire industry. And Google definitely has the skills to pull it off.


But here’s the conundrum for the games industry – and gamers. Will Stadia do to games what YouTube has done to video? A frantic, algorithmically-powered race for attention that’s great for Google’s profits but, at times, bad for creatives. For a sneak preview, look at the free-to-play mobile gaming industry. Here, games that rely on how long people are willing to play – and thus how many adverts they see or in-game items they buy – are markedly different from console games. That’s not a specific issue with Google, but one the games industry as a whole (Nintendo aside, perhaps) will have to tackle as it moves from pay-per-game to games streaming.

That issue of changing the financial incentive for publishers is right at the core of what Google is proposing. Just like YouTube wasn’t about putting the TV on the internet, Stadia isn’t about shoehorning home console games onto a cloud streaming service. It’s about making gaming ubiquitous, never more than a click away from almost every corner of the internet. Which raises another question: who is Stadia for?

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Stadia’s specs put it way out ahead of what the current generation of consoles can do. On the face of it, this makes Stadia a play for hardcore gamers. And Google being Google, it’s not just planning on delivering 1080p graphics at 60fps – at launch, Stadia will support 4K at 60fps with HDR and surround sound. No big deal.

Then there’s YouTube – a platform on which 50 billion hours’ worth of gaming content was watched in 2018 – and Google’s ingenious plan to let people boot games directly from videos. Right now, when you want to buy or play a game you have to go into a physical or virtual store. Google’s pitch is to potentially turn any stream or walkthrough of any game, on any platform, into a save file for that game that can be opened through Stadia. This, really, is what the new platform is all about.


The technology, called State Share, will essentially turn video uploads into save files. Anyone then watching that video with Stadia can jump right in and pick up the gameplay as if they were the person who uploaded the video. While everyone else was nervously side-eying Epic’s recently-launched game store and wondering what it might mean for Steam’s dominance, Google was quietly working on a system that will turn the entire internet into a storefront. It’s very weird, it’s very clever and it’s very Google.

But people spending billions of hours watching videos of games on YouTube is very different to playing them through YouTube. And it’s here that Stadia hits up against a very stubborn obstacle: your wonky internet connection. For most people, that’s a problem Google likely cannot solve. And no matter how impressive the technology is on Google’s cloud servers, a throttled internet connection is going to collapse at the prospect of livestreaming a game in 4K at 60fps.

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As Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter notes, that limitation makes trade-offs an inevitability. On a big TV, Stadia will likely look ropey compared to a home console. Tackling that image compression problem at scale – across a myriad of different territories with confusingly different broadband infrastructures – is a massive headache for Google. In ideal conditions, Stadia seemingly has the technical capabilities to blow everything else out the water. But how many people will be able to get that level of performance? And given that risk, are people really going to ditch PCs, Xboxes and PlayStations for Google’s alternative?


Simply put: yes. But not all people. To get the best-in-class performance, many will still buy Xboxes and PlayStations and high-performance PCs. Everyone else, Google hopes, will subscribe to Stadia. And once full fibre and 5G are widespread, Stadia could, in theory, out-perform even the most expensive of gaming PCs. In the meantime, most people won’t care enough about the extra level of graphical performance to notice.

Fifa and Call of Duty played on a big TV through Stadia will look pretty much as good as on Xbox. On a laptop, games played through Stadia will likely look great. On a phone, they’ll look even better – though squeezing a home console game onto a tiny screen will open up other user experience problems. The success of the Nintendo Switch has shown there is an appetite for home consoles that you can pick up and play anywhere. But Nintendo being Nintendo, that experience is still locked away behind a games console. Stadia promises to make this flexibility available on (almost) any device. It’s both beautiful and terrifying.

But Stadia won’t have the stage to itself for long. Microsoft’s Project xCloud, announced in October 2018, will enter public trials this year. Amazon, which owns Twitch, is rumoured to be working on something similar. Sony already has PlayStation Now. At root, all these services offer the same thing, but the difference between Stadia and xCloud or PlayStation Now is that Microsoft and Sony have home consoles to fall back on. For people who want the convenience of playing games on the go but the top-spec experience at home, a physical console is likely still a necessity.

Which brings us back to that tricky question: who is Stadia for? To understand that, Google needs to reveal more details. First, how much will it cost? Assuming it will be a subscription and not a pay-per-title model, will Google pitch Stadia as a Netflix for games (and a direct competitor to Microsoft’s Game Pass) and keep the price at around $10 per month, or as a bells-and-whistles high-end console in the cloud with a much loftier monthly subscription or one-off cost? It will, almost inevitably, be the low-cost option. Google, after all, is all about scale.

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Then there’s the issue of games. What games will be available on Stadia? What exclusive games will it have? What innovative, exclusive features will the platform be able to use to entice in new customers? In gaming, content is king. And top quality exclusive content is gold dust. Google undoubtedly has the technical expertise to take on Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, but as Microsoft itself has shown it takes many years and many billions of dollars to get a foothold in the gaming industry. And if there’s one thing Google has, it’s billions of dollars.

This is a hugely exciting time and Google should be applauded for making a bold, innovative move in an emerging market. Streaming games at the scale it is proposing opens up the industry like never before. Stadia, and its integration with YouTube, will not only create all sorts of gameplay innovations, it will also reduce the cost of developing and playing games. But, at heart, Google is a data collector that makes almost all of its money from selling advertising. To understand what that might mean for the games industry, just compare the top-grossing games on Google’s Play Store with Breath of the Wild or God of War.

Which brings us back to the crisitunity. Stadia is undoubtedly the future of gaming – or at least one version of it. But, as ever, the future remains tantalisingly out of reach. While its rivals play catch-up, Google has an opportunity to shape the future of gaming. For publishers and developers, the challenge now is to ensure the games industry isn’t reshaped solely for the benefit of Google.

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