Google made headlines last week at the gaming conference when it announces a new gaming platform called STADIA. This is there statement on the launch of Stadia “The future of gaming is not a box,” according to Google. “It’s a place.” Just like how humans have built stadiums for sports over hundreds of years, Google believes it’s building a virtual stadium”. Stadia is a platform where one can play all kinds of games without the use of a console. All you need is a play pad or phone and you connect to thousands of games and can even play other while still on the platform. This is a game changer considering most multi player games have to be on a console like playstation, XBOX or Nitendo wii. People are calling it the Netflix of gaming
Stadia is a subscription-based platform where you just need to have an internet connection and you are set. It can stream up to 4K videos depending on your internet speed and is overlaid over chrome and youtube. This means if you see an add on youtube about the game, you can click on the play option of the video and it open the game straight from google chrome. 30% of the videos on youtube are about games and google want to cash in on this trend. Stadia will only be available through Chrome, Chromecast, and on Android devices initially. To run this massive project, google is using its massive server network and it experience it the cloud sphere. Stadia is clearly a cloudbased service.
This hasn’t gone un-noticed by the competition, that is Sony and Microsoft who control much of the console markets. Both companies run a cloud based streaming service but it has to go through their console. Google is challenging that, the console business, the advantages that the two companies have is that they have thousands of great games in their vault and google will have to do a lot of heavy lifting to get to par with the others.