At the 2019 Game Developers Conference, Google announced the launch of a new product called Stadia that will be available this year. You might have already seen its name appearing on your Facebook Newsfeed as your friends cheer and bemoan for its soon-existence. So what’s Stadia?
Stadia is a cloud-based gaming service by Google that will allow you to quickly enter into gaming mode after watching a game trailer on YouTube or link. As everything is stored in Google’s data centre over the cloud, it makes it convenient for you to start a game and carry on where you left off from one device to another. To paint you a better image, imagine the portability of Nintendo Switch but with its functionality on your smartphone or tablet.
Two things that are probably on your mind now are whether the quality of gaming experience remains the same across devices and what kind of games can you expect from it?
Well, the gaming experience will definitely vary when you switch devices. The good news is that the resolution and frame per second (fps) will depend on your device’s specification. According to Google, Stadia can already support up to 4K at 60fps and in the future, 8K resolution. So if 1080p should not be a problem.
With this cross-platform capability, everyone with a smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop or TV can play any games via Stadia. But there’s no mention of MacBooks, so we shall not assume.
As for the type of games, Google didn’t specifically share the titles that will be available once Stadia is launched. But during the presentation, the Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was used as an example for demonstration. It is subtle yet obvious that Stadia is capable of supporting AAA game titles. So you can imagine how disruptive Stadia will be to current market leaders like Xbox, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch when it’s launched.
Announced together with Stadia is also its controller. You can safely call it a smart controller because of what it can do.
The Stadia controller automatically detects the device that you want to play via its Wi-Fi connection to the data centre and you can start playing from there.
Two of the coolest things that the Stadia controller can do is that you can directly share and save your game experience straight to YouTube with your friends, yourself or to the world with the Capture button. Another is that you might be able to use the Google Assistant button to activate built-in gaming features created by the game developers.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and ditch our gaming consoles just yet. There are still some unanswered questions like the speed of connection required and the subscription price. So stay tuned with us to find out more about Stadia.
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