I participated in Project Stream, the codename for what is now called Stadia. Back in the fall, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was offered as a public test, and all you had to do was sign up. So I did. The sweetener was a free copy of the game after the completion of the test.
For a month, I played AC:O nightly, streaming it to either my desktop or laptop. While I never tried to play outside of my home, the experience was amazing. I used a Bluetooth-connected PS4 controller, though keyboard/mouse or other controller would have worked as well.
The game ran almost flawlessly. All I needed to do was open up a URL in Chrome, and it would launch the game in less than a minute most of the time. And regardless of if I was last playing on my desktop or laptop, my saved game was immediately available. Steam has a similar functionality, but I’ve noticed issued with the upload and sync sometimes.
The few times I graphics issues or lag was when my wife was streaming a Netflix Original or other 4K content. I guess even having a 250 Mb/sec connection wasn’t enough to keep up with both.
This, of course, brings in another issue in: connectivity. It’s great that at their GDC announcement, they outlined the hardware they have and its distributed nature. But when I’m up at my parents, with their 2 Mb/sec connection, I can almost guarantee that I won’t be able to play. Stadia did seem to downscale the stream from 1080p, but that can look a little ugly on a 4K monitor.
The specs
Google announced was that Stadia will launch in 2019 in at least the US, Canada, United Kingdom, and various European countries. At launch, it will support the following graphics:
- 4K resolution
- 60 FPS
- HDR
Of course, you will need a screen that can handle this input. The Project Stream test was limited to 1080p, which looked fine on my 4K laptop. I would love to see 4K 60FPS from Stadia.
In addition to this, the intent is for your device to be inconsequential. Whether it’s a desktop, laptop, tablet, Chromebook, or phone, the game should stream. This kind of cross-platform availability is a dream for those of us with multiple devices.
How it all works
Stadia is cloud gaming. Today, all the major platforms support some kind of cloud-based saving. That means that if you can access your account, you can access you saved games, regardless of the device. Those of us who get a PS4 stolent, it means we can recover progress, even if the games and the machine are gone.
But what this does is turn your device into a monitor with a video cable into a Google data center. When you launch a game, Stadia generates an instance in the data center, and the video is streamed back to your device. All the computation, processing, game saving, etc, are handled outside of your device. That’s why a desktop with nothing more than integrated graphics could play at 4K if it was connected to the right monitor.
For those who use their own controller, there might be a small amount of lag. I did not notice any in my Project Stream experience, but Google has you covered there. To go along with Stadia, Google is launching a new controller that will connect via WiFi to the data center directly, without the intermediate hop through your device. Besides making BT pairing or USB cables unnecessary, this should reduce the lag between input and game. Might be important in action-packed games.
Create + Scale + Connect
Being Google, they are tying Stadia to their other services. They talked about a YouTube integration that would allow a developer to create a “Play Now” style button on their channel or as part of a trailer. This would then immediately launch Stadia and allow the gamer a chance to be playing the game within 5 minutes.
Since the content is streamed at 4K, 60FPS, creators who wish to publish directly to YouTube will be able to use that quality, regardless of how it looked on their device. This should also allow for a painless upload process, as it will remain within the walls of Google.
Finally, Google will bring in Google Assistant. The use cases they presented was a way to use it to help the gamer get content or help about the game they are playing, while staying immersed. They noted that today, a gamer would have to search for a video, jump to the timestamp of interest, and watch if they needed help completing a task or challenge.
Connecting with your Community
For both developers and creators, two new technologies were added that help foster two-way interaction.
The first that I found interesting was State Share. This is a way to “save” the state of the world, including the character, situation, health, etc., and then share it out to the world. The ideas proposed were to set up public challenges, share moments from the game, and other ideas. What popped into my mind was a way to help bug reporting. If you can capture the exact state of the world and send it seamlessly to the developers, that could help resolve some of those odd or hard-to-reproduce bugs. But that’s my technology/prod support background coming out.
The other was Crowd Play, which is more for game streamers. The idea is to create your very own lobby for fans to join you and play a game together. This gives control to the creator over who gets to join, rather than relying on random chance or giving out things like Gamer Handles to allow people to find you.
Developer helping hands
Here’s where Stadia could be revolutionary, at least in my humble opinion. By creating a single platform on which to develop games that has a level of power that is double the existing game consoles and could be easily upgraded by Google if this takes off, developers are no longer hamstrung by limiting their vision to the least-powerful platform.
If I’m creating a cross-platform game for PC, Xbox, and PS4, I have a certain expectation for the consoles. But the PC is a wild-card. You can reach out to Steam to see what they have as a median platform and use that as your minimum specs, but that might be too limiting. And if the gulf between PC and the consoles is too great, the experience starts to vary immensely. If a game relies on visuals, and one of the platforms can’t keep up, it hurts sales. Plus you need to code for multiple codebases, configurations, etc. Even in the world of XBox and PS4, there are different flavors.
Stadia resolves this by creating a single hardware spec that exceeds current-gen hardware, and uses standard tools like Vulkan and engines like Unreal and Unity. This means it will be easier to get something out the door, with fewer issues about compatibility.
The future of gaming
There were a lot of other interesting side items, such as bringing back split-screen multiplayer, that could provide some changes to the current game genres. To me, the biggest benefit of this was removing the need for expensive hardware that I need to maintain, replace, or even troubleshoot.
Of course, Google isn’t the only one looking down this path; they are just the first to announce a commercialized version. It’s been reported elsewhere that Sony and Microsoft have discussed it. Microsoft has publicly stated they will start trials in 2019 of Project xCloud Sony recently stated it was a future threat, which implies they haven’t figured out a response yet.
What this all means is that we probably will be seeing another gaming revolution. Mobile gaming really caught a lot of people by surprise, and the rise of microtransactions have spilled into console games, much to the chagrin of gamers. I don’t see this replacing the current model of game delivery, as many types of games don’t necessarily lend themselves to living in the cloud. Another issue, from a community engagement standpoint, is how modding is handled. Modding is very popular, and it’s frequently a feature of popular games like the Civilization series.
In all, the next couple of years should show how popular cloud gaming can actually be, and if it’s really as democratic and accessible as Google was saying. Connectivity is still an issue in the US, let alone the rest of the world. And how this will be priced will be a thorny question. Will it be ala carte, a subscription service, or something in between? I have high hopes that it will allow even more indie and small developers a chance to stand up with the established big boys, but that all depends on what the access looks like.