Google launched Stadia, a subscription streaming gaming service.
Instead of buying games, downloading them to your device (or using a disk) and running the code on your own hardware, the code all runs in the cloud on Google’s own computation resources, and the video output is streamed to your copy of Chrome, on any device (phone, tablet, Chromecast TV): your controller sends your movements back to the cloud to be acted on. In other words, the PlayStation itself is in the cloud and only the TV and the controller are in your home.
Plus, that video output is tightly integrated with YouTube (for those not keeping up, watching other people play games is a big thing)
This has been tried before, but Google is betting the time is now right and of course that it has the resources and end-points (hundreds of millions of people with the Chrome browser).
Lots of games industry questions here (Can Google bring in enough developers and titles? Does this find a market gap? What exactly is the pricing/business model?), but at a higher level, it’s worth contrasting this with Google’s launch last week of full speech recognition running locally on smartphones: Google is both moving computing from the cloud to the edge and vice versa. We have vast computing power at both ends and are working out what goes where. (See also Facebook’s move to end-to-end encryption: what will have to be happening locally on the device? Ads? Abuse monitoring?)
After a decade or more of speculation and discussion, Apple is launching some kind of TV service (and perhaps also its subscription news/magazine service) on Monday at 10am PST. The event will be live-streamed. (Meta-comment: Apple is making its move in the 20th century’s dominant form of entertainment while Google made its move in the 21st century’s new form of entertainment with Stadia this week.) Link. (((etc etc)))
