When Bill Gates and The Rock unveiled the original Xbox almost twenty years ago, everyone thought Microsoft was crazy for jumping into a market dominated by Sony and Nintendo. Almost two decades later, the console is in its fourth iteration and still doing relatively well. Google is poised to do something similar but on a much larger scale with Stadia, “a new gaming platform from Google for playing AAA video games across all kinds of screens.” The premise is simple enough, in theory: Google is going to run everything on the backend from one of their data centers, so all you have to do is fire up Chrome or YouTube and you can play all kinds of games from your TV, phone, tablet or computer. You won’t need a powerful gaming PC or console to play games. You won’t need a separate box or complicated equipment to stream your gaming sessions because direct to YouTube is possible. You’ll also be able to watch your favorite streamers on YouTube and jump right into the action where they are. You won’t have to worry about updates or downloads. This all sounds fantastic, but we have so many questions. How much will it cost? When will it actually be available? What games will be available other than Doom Eternal (the one they confirmed)? What studios will be making games for it? How fast does our Internet need to be? Will it only work on Android hardware? Outside of maybe Amazon, Google is the only other company that could pull something like this off, so we’re excited to see what the future holds when Stadia starts to roll out later this year.
Is Google Stadia the Future of Gaming?
