Before the Internet
Before the Internet Podcast: Google Stadia and the Past, Present and Future of Gaming
Imagine not needing expensive gaming hardware to play the next big video game release. That’s the hook of Google’s new cloud gaming service, Stadia. At launch, Google promises Stadia (which was prototyped under the Project Stream moniker) will support desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones – without the need for a console. Google claims they will take care of all the heavy lifting on its own servers, which can process the latest version of a video game at high resolutions – up to 4K, 60fps game, in five seconds. To put that in perspective, Google Stadia’s cloud computing power is the equivalent of a console running at 10.7 GPU teraflops, that’s twice the power of the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X combined. Google is making big promises and if it delivers on these promises, it will change the video game industry forever.
This week on the Before the Internet Podcast, Mike Worby and John Cal McCormick join Ricky D to discuss Google’s new technology and how it will bring players, developers, streamers, and viewers closer together. How will Stadia effect Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and other competitors? When is Stadia launching and how much will it cost? Will Stadia come with a subscription service similar to Netflix? What games will be released on launch and will Stadia have any exclusive games worth investing in? We have a lot of questions this week and one of the biggest questions on everyone’s mind is how Stadia will affect sales of physical hardware and software moving forward.
Google’s presentation was fixed inside an hour and in that hour they made plenty of progress but also left us with plenty of questions. Regardless of the outcome, 2019 will be remembered as the year Google invaded the gaming industry. Whether or not the launch of Stadia will be as smooth as Google will like you to believe, remains to be seen.
Editor’s Note: This episode is now only available on YouTube.
Matt D
April 1, 2019 at 1:40 pm
While Steam & the Epic store provide competition in the software sales area of the business, they aren’t platforms. You don’t play games “on” Steam, you play them through steam on a PC. Call it nit-picking if you want, but steam isn’t a “competitor” in the sense that you make them out to be; they’re a software vendor not a platform vendor. Stadia will provide a platform, so they’ll be a direct competitor, but (if it succeeds) they’re going to hurt companies like NVidia and AMD much more than they’re gonna hurt Nintendo, Sony, or M$.
Why spend hundreds on new video cards, CPUs, RAM, and MoBos every few years when instead you can just pay a flat monthly fee (yearly fee?) to have access to Stadia which would (assumingely) always be top of the line? While PC gamers who care about modding may stay away from Stadia, those who only care about having the best specs may be drawn to it.
Regardless, it’s a pipe dream at this point, and google is BS. Saying the future of gaming isn’t a box is a blatant lie… the box just isn’t in your house, it’s in theirs, and that means latency. Imagine dying to a boss because your ping to their server spikes thus causing a higher than expected input delay. Or better yet, for competitive online games, all of your inputs will need to go to the Stadia servers and then be routed to the servers of the online game your playing… that’s just gross, so much delay.
There are plenty of areas in Canada and the USA that have NO internet service at all in 2019, and many many more areas with shit internet. While the idea of full steaming is obviously the future, it’s still so far off it’s not even funny.