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Google’s Game Builder turns building multiplayer games into a game
Google’s Area 120 team, the company’s in-house incubator for some of its more experimental projects, today launched Game Builder, a free and easy to use tool for PC and macOS users who want to build their own 3D games without having to know how to code. Game Builder is currently only available through Valve’s Steam platform, so you’ll need an account there to try it.
After a quick download, Game Builder asks you about what screen size you want to work on and then drops you right into the experience after you tell it whether you want to start a new project, work on an existing project or try out some sample projects. These sample projects include a first-person shooter, a platformer and a demo of the tool’s card system for programming more complex interactions.
The menu system and building experience take some getting used to and isn’t immediately intuitive, but after a while, you’ll get the hang of it. By default, the overall design aesthetic clearly draws some inspiration from Minecraft, but you’re pretty free in what kind of game you want to create. It does not strike me as a tool for getting smaller children into game programming since we’re talking about a relatively text-heavy and complex experience.
To build more complex interactions, you use Game Builder’s card-based visual programming system. That’s pretty straightforward, too, but also takes some getting used to. Google says building a 3D level is like playing a game. There’s some truth in that, in that you are building inside the game environment, but it’s not necessarily an easy game either.
One cool feature here is that you can also build multiplayer games and even create games in real time with your friends.
Traditionally, drag-and-drop game builders feel pretty limited. The Area 120 team is trying to overcome this by also letting you use JavaScript to go beyond some of the pre-programmed features. Google is also betting on Poly, its library of 3D objects, to give users lots of options for creating and designing their levels.
It’s no secret that Google is taking games pretty seriously these days, now that it is getting ready to launch its Stadia game streaming service later this year. There doesn’t seem to be a connection between the two just yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw Game Builder on Stadia, too.
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What do subscription services and streaming mean for the future of gaming?
The future of gaming is streaming. If that wasn’t painfully obvious to you a week ago, it certainly ought to be now. Google got ahead of E3 late last week by finally shedding light on Stadia, a streaming service that promises a hardware agnostic gaming future.
It’s still very early days, of course. We got a demo of the platform right around the time of its original announcement. But it was a controlled one — about all we can hope for at the moment. There are still plenty of moving parts to contend with here, including, perhaps most consequentially, broadband caps.
But this much is certainly clear: Google’s not the only company committed to the idea of remote game streaming. Microsoft didn’t devote a lot of time to Project xCloud on stage the other day — on fact, the pass with which the company blew threw that announcement was almost news in and of itself.
It did, however, promise an October arrival for the service — beating out Stadia by a full month. The other big piece of the announcement was the ability for Xbox One owners to use their console as a streaming source for their own remote game play. Though how that works and what, precisely, the advantage remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that Microsoft is hanging its hat on the Xbox as a point of distinction from Google’s offering.
It’s clear too, of course, that Microsoft is still invested in console hardware as a key driver of its gaming future. Just after rushing through all of that Project xCloud noise, it took the wraps off of Project Scarlett, its next-gen console. We know it will feature 8K content, some crazy fast frame rates and a new Halo title. Oh, and there’s an optical drive, too, because Microsoft’s not quite ready to give up on physical media just yet.
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How gaming on Microsoft xCloud compares to Google Stadia
Cloud gaming is one of the big topics of excitement ahead of E3. The market is very niche but the technology feels exciting, allowing users to play graphically-complex titles on a bunch of low-powered devices thanks to server farms and fast internet connections.
We had a chance to go hands-on with Google’s Stadia platform at GDC and I/O, now at E3, Microsoft is letting the media test out their previously-announced service xCloud. I’ve spent a bit of time with both, so how do they compare?
The biggest difference is that we still know bizarrely little about xCloud, while many expected the service to be the main topic of discussion at the Xbox E3 event, the service was mentioned for mere seconds as execs focused their energies on Xbox Game Pass and the upcoming Project Scarlett hardware.
Pricing, exact release dates, device support and internet requirements of xCloud are all up in air. We know it’s coming later this year for public use just as Stadia is. There are a lot of question marks, but here’s what we were working with in our demo of server-based gaming on xCloud.
Much like Stadia, xCloud is a streaming service that abides by the laws of nature, like speed of light, so latency is a thing. On the topic of lag — which is one of the big viability questions with these platforms — it seems like Microsoft’s solution is in lockstep with Google Stadia. The naked eye can only detect so much especially in a demo environment where the environment is set up to be perfect, but streaming in LA from servers based in the Bay Area didn’t cause any major problems as I demoed a couple titles briefly.
The easiest way to showcase the latency on these systems seems to be picking up an in-game gun and finding the length of time that passes between trigger press and the muzzle flash. It was perceptible and more so than when I’m playing at home but likely only because I was directing all of my attention to that metric. When it came to frame rates flowing and resolution streaming, the brief demos held up, though again this is a tech platform that’s all about having network perfection in place and demo environments are pretty unreliable representations of standard scenarios.
I saw some hiccups in my Stadia demo, though a system restart rectified them. I didn’t have any issues on xCloud though the demo environments were different in each demo.
One big question mark is whether Xbox is going to release a specialized controller that connects to the Cloud directly to cut down on latency. Stadia has already done this, but this won’t make as big a difference to a lot of Xbox One users who likely won’t bother with buying a new controller to shave off a few milliseconds. That said, as you can see, there was some xCloud-specific branding on the Xbox controllers we used, so there could be some developments here.
Stadia requires a 35 Mbps download connection in order to play 4K games, we don’t know anything about the xCloud standards there, but I’d imagine expectations should be kept fairly similar though you might have to worry about both ends of the equation if you’re streaming from your personal Xbox on a home network to a mobile device elsewhere.
What’s a bit fascinating is how both Microsoft and Google chose to showcase the advances in their streaming technology. While Google showcased Stadia as a console replacement, xCloud’s demo reframed the service as a way to bring console gaming on-the-go.
This isn’t entirely revolutionary as services like Sony’s Remote Play offered some of this functionality, but the scope of support could be larger here. Our demo was on a Samsung Galaxy device attached to an Xbox One controller. We haven’t heard details on the scope of supported mobile devices but given that Stadia is only launching on the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3a, even with the latest Samsung Galaxy devices, Microsoft could already have Google beaten there out-of-the-gate.
I will say it felt different playing a console-level title with a phone screen. You have wildly different expectations of what your phone can handle because you’ve spent years with limited mobile games while open-world RPGs have been out of reach. Mobile processors have gotten more beefy, but pushing graphics that have teraflops of power behind them is a very cool experience though it does make me wish that Microsoft had a mobile system or a controller that was a bit more phone-friendly because the current solution feels more than a little hack-y.
On the topic of value, we know that console streaming for existing console owners will be free, we similarly know that 1080p streaming on Stadia will be free once you buy games on the platform, though if you want 4K resolution, you’ll have to pony up $9.99 per month. We don’t know if xCloud is going to have any limitations on console streaming users.
If xCloud boasts support for the full Xbox library, that’s going to be something that keeps Stadia from competing. The network effects of buying single-player titles might be limited but if cross-play for multi-player is something a title doesn’t boast than chances are gamers will want to stay where their friends are. Building an entire player network from scratch won’t be easy for Google and Xbox has one hell of a head-start.
The biggest unanswered question is how Microsoft prices xCloud for gamers without a console and whether there is some too-good-to-refuse combo deal with Xbox Game Pass. The entire market still feels a little niche and I think it’s a bit unrealistic to think we’re already approaching a post-console world, but Microsoft being aggressive here could prevent Stadia from gaining any sort of a foothold.
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Week-in-Review: Google makes a losing bet, Bezos plots his space take-over
Hey, weekend readers. This is Week-in-Review where I get hopped up on caffeine and give a heavy amount of analysis on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week to surface my favorites for your reading pleasure.
Last week, I talked about the Apple device that was putting a kink in the company’s new pricing strategy. Of course, this week we saw that strategy reach new heights with the Mac Pro, but more on that in a bit.
I’m a couple hours away from flying down to Los Angeles to check out the E3 gaming expo, but one of the biggest gaming announcements of the month already happened this past week when Google shared some more details on its Stadia cloud gaming platform.
Stadia’s approach is far from unprecedented, but Google’s solution might be one of the more thoughtful efforts we’ve seen. We got some more details this week, here’s my story, and here are the top-level details:
- U.S. pricing for the pro-tier is $9.99 per month for unlimited 4K 60fps streaming and access to a library of titles, though you’ll still have to pay for most new games.
- You’ll need a 35 mpbs connection to stream Stadia Pro when it launches in November.
- There’s a 1080p free tier, launching later, that will allow gamers to play titles they buy from the Stadia store.
This is a pretty aggressive showing for Google.
Given the infrastructure costs, $9.99 is pretty cheap and adding a free tier is a bold call. Google’s strategy might be as formidable as they could make it, but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to win the cloud gaming market…
The first thing to acknowledge is that because of the incredibly stiff infrastructure/network demands of these plays, the only companies that can likely take on Google here are Amazon and Microsoft.
The AWS giant is already renting out some very expensive cloud GPUs but they haven’t made any indication of a foray into a gaming-focused subscription, though it may not be long if this market finds legs. Microsoft on the other hand is probably hours away from making its announcement. At 1pm PT Sunday, the company’s Xbox head is expected to share the company’s cloud-gaming plans, I’ll be there reporting on the news.
Google is acting plenty aggressive but Microsoft still has a huge upper hand. Becoming a gaming company is about far more than infrastructure and Google doesn’t have much history on its side when it comes to high-end gaming or… the games.
YouTube Gaming is probably Stadia’s best asset and integrations there can leverage that platform’s reach to encourage experimenting with the platform, but I still don’t trust the company to follow through with the resources to get enough developers to bring their titles to Stadia. The initial market that Stadia is grabbing for just feels so niche and Google hasn’t exactly been known to follow-through on consumer efforts that take longer than a few rounds of internal performance reviews to take off.
The Stadia team has already shown off a few games, but there are tens of millions of Xbox Ones out there filled with purchased titles and Google might just be probably overestimating the appeal of their cross-platform approach.
Google’s understated claim is that this is a limitless platform that can bring your desktop games to phones, tablets, laptops and TVs, but how many places do consumers really want desktop-class games? Can it truly claim to be a mobile-friendly platform when it only supports a few of its own phones at launch? More so, do people want to connect a game controller to their phone? It all seems like a fairly niche grab.
Google’s Stadia marketing seems to be looking to convert console users to ChromeCast users but given that YouTube Gaming is the company’s best discovery method, what’s likely going to end up happening is that Stadia drags in a very niche subset of aspiring PC gamers who don’t want to pay for high-end rigs. This will probably bring in some free Stadia Base 1080p users, but it’s going to be the latency — no matter how minimal Google can claim it to be — that shuts out a lot of PC die-hards from signing onto the Stadia Pro plan.
For single-player experiences, Stadia won’t have too many issues, but a lot of the top game publishers are focusing their full efforts on multi-player. Google barely touched on the topic of multi-player at its event, the fact is if developers enable cross-platform play with Stadia, those users are likely going to be at a tactical disadvantage. For a platform like Xbox One, Microsoft has enough existing reach that they can probably cordon off those streaming users into their own servers and keep the odds even, but Google may have some issues here fresh-out-the-gate.
There is still quite a bit we don’t know about Stadia, and I’m very anxious to see what Microsoft has up its sleeve, but Google just doesn’t feel like the right kind of company to pull this off… Let me know what your thoughts are though.
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On to the rest of the week’s news.
Trends of the week
Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context.
- Apple’s hardware finally goes Pro
You might have a MacBook Pro or an iPad Pro but chances are most of you aren’t much in the way of a professional. If you thought blowing $899 on a tablet made you a deep spender, try blowing $999 on the stand for your monitor. At its WWDC keynote this week, Apple went back to basics design-wise on its Mac Pro, but it cranked the pricing up to 11 with a $5,999 starting price for the tower and a $4,999 starting price for its 6K display. This falls in line with Apple’s latest trend towards pushing hardware prices higher, but, Jesus, this took things to a new level for Pros. Here’s our hands-on with the monster. - Looker catches Google’s eye
$2.6 billion is a fair amount of cash but it’s pocket change in the war for the cloud. Google announced Thursday that it was acquiring analytics startup Looker to strengthen its Google Cloud offering in the face of competition from AWS and Azure. More here. - ZuckCoin
Facebook is getting ready to show off its own cryptocurrency later this month. The coin, codenamed Libra, will be getting its own white paper on June 18th and will reportedly be pegged to a batch of current coins and will be managed by an external entity. Read more here. - Bezos takes over space
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos talked about his plans to create the infrastructure network for space startups at the company’s re:Mars conference. “You cannot start an interesting space company today from your dorm room. The price of admission is too high and the reason for that is that the infrastructure doesn’t exist,” Bezos noted. “So my mission with Blue Origin is to help build that infrastructure, that heavy lifting infrastructure that future generations will be able to stand on top of the same way I stood on top of the U.S. Postal Service and so on.” Check our more of what he had to say in our story.
GAFA Gaffes
How did the top tech companies screw up this week? This clearly needs its own section, in order of awfulness:
- GAFA getting eyed by some three-letter agencies:
[Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook are in the crosshairs of the FTC and DOJ ] - YouTube pisses off gay creators:
[YouTube says homophobic taunts don’t violate its policies] - Google Play Store gets its antitrust moment-in-the-sun:
[Aptoide, a Play Store rival, cries antitrust foul over Google hiding its app] - Apple pricing gets egregious, earns keynote groans:
[Meet Apple’s secret weapon for keeping Wall Street happy]
Extra Crunch
Our premium subscription service had another week of interesting deep dives. TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois wrote about the interesting rise of Kubernetes and chatted with some of the key players involved in its ascension.
How Kubernetes came to rule the world
“…To talk about how Kubernetes came to be, I sat down with Craig McLuckie, one of the co-founders of Kubernetes at Google (who then went on to his own startup, Heptio, which he sold to VMware); Tim Hockin, another Googler who was an early member on the project and was also on Google’s Borg team; and Gabe Monroy, who co-founded Deis, one of the first successful Kubernetes startups, and then sold it to Microsoft, where he is now the lead PM for Azure Container Compute (and often the public face of Microsoft’s efforts in this area)..”
Here are some of our other top reads this week for premium subscribers. This week TechCrunch writers talked a bit about ROI, and how security startups are capturing M&A attention…
- Why four security startups just sold for $1.5 billion
- Is your event strategy paying off? How to calculate your event ROI
Want more TechCrunch newsletters? Sign up here.
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Here are all of the trailers from today’s Google Stadia announcement
You know the deal: a console is nothing without games. Same goes for streaming plans. Google jumped the gun on E3 this week with its Stadia Connect, a live stream that takes more than a page or two from Nintendo’s Direct offering. The event offered a little more insight into pricing, availability and specs — and, mostly importantly, showed off some of the titles coming to the streaming platform.
The list includes some familiar franchises and a couple of exclusives, which will be available for a $10 a month subscription fee or for individual purchase.
The first, Moonshine Studios/Coat Sink’s Get Packed will be a Stadia exclusive at launch. The title brings Overcooked-style game play to furniture packing — arguably the most frustrating thing in the world. The co-op title allows up to four players to participate, because you know how easy it is recruiting friends to help you move.
Bungie’s received Destiny sequel will be arriving on Stadia. The first-person shooter includes the new chapter, Shadowkeep, which features a return to the lunar surface.
Another Stadia exclusive, the single-player puzzle adventure title Gylt features some dark, supernatural gameplay. The Tequila Works title centers on a young girl’s search for her missing cousin.
The D&D-based RPG Baldur’s Gate III will be coming to both Stadia and PC.
Google closed things out with a sizzle reel focused on the breadth of titles coming to the platform, including games from top-tier publishers like Ubisoft, Take 2, SquareEnix, Warner Bros., Bandai Namco and Bethesda.
The service launches this November.
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Here’s how Google Stadia performs depending on your internet connection
Google is introducing more about the launch of its Stadia streaming gaming service today, and VP Phil Harrison gave us performance specifics today so you can see exactly how the company thinks the service will perform based on what kind of internet connection you have. It tops out at an impressive 4K resolution, with HDR color, 60fps frame rate and 5.1 surround sound, but you’ll have to have at least a 35 Mbps connection to get that level of quality.
Meanwhile, at 20 Mbps you’ll get full HD 1080p output, while retaining HDR video, 60fps and 5.1 surround. And Google has optimized for smoothness of stream by retaining 60 fps all the way down to its recommended minimum bandwidth connection quality of 10 Mbps (and even potentially below that based on this chart). You’ll only get 720p streams at that level, however, and stereo instead of surround sound.
“With Stadia, our goal is to make gaming more accessible for everyone,” is how Harrison framed it, and that applies to its range of connection support as well as its device availability. At launch you’ll be able to play Stadia games on your TV (via Chromecast Ultra), desktop, laptop and tablet (via browsers) and on smartphones, though only Pixel phones to begin with starting with Pixel 3 and Pixel 3a (via dedicated Stadia app).
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What latency feels like on Google’s Stadia cloud gaming platform
After peppering Google employees with questions regarding Stadia’s latency, pricing and supported devices, to mostly no avail, I got my hands on one of their new controllers and pressed play on the Doom 2016 gameplay they were showing off on a big-screen TV.
Things started off pretty ugly. The frame rate dropped to a fast-paced PowerPoint presentation, the resolution dipped between 4K crispness and indecipherable blurriness and latency seemed to be as much as a half-second. As the Google employees looked nervously at each other, someone grabbed the controller from me and restarted the system.
After a system restart, things moved along much, much more smoothly. But what the situation sums up is that when it comes to game streaming, things can be unpredictable. To give Google credit, they stress-tested their system by running Stadia on hotel Wi-Fi rather than taking me down to Mountain View and letting me play with Stadia under much more controlled conditions.
Stadia is Google’s cloud game-streaming service and, while there’s a lot we don’t know, the basic tenants are clear. It moves console-level gaming online into your Chrome browser and lets you access it from devices like smartphones that wouldn’t be able to handle the GPU-load initially.
Despite the initial hiccup, my experience with Stadia was largely positive. Doom 2016 was in crisp 4K and I was able to focus on the game without thinking about the service I was playing it on, which is ultimately the best endorsement of a new platform like this.
This will likely be a great service for more casual gamers, but might not be the best fit for the most hardcore users playing multi-player titles. While you may be launching this service directly from YouTube feeds of esports gamers, this is something they probably wouldn’t use. That’s because the latency between input and something being displayed onscreen isn’t imperceptible, though it’s probably good enough for the vast majority of users (myself included), which is still a worthy prize for the company’s efforts to take on the massive gaming market.
Google Stadia VP Phil Harrison wouldn’t give me a proper range of where exactly latency fell, but he did say it was less than the time it took for a human to perceive something and react — which another Google employee then told me differed person-to-person, but was generally 70ms-130ms — so I suppose the most official number we’ll get is that the latency is probably somewhere less than 70ms.
There is no hard truth here, though, because latency will really depend on your geographic proximity to the data center. Being in San Francisco, I connected to a data center roughly 50 miles away in San Jose. Google confirmed to me that not all rural users in supported countries will be able to signup for the service at launch because of this.
Other interesting things to note:
- Google said they’d confirm devices later, but when asked about iOS support at launch they highlighted that they were focused on Pixel devices at launch.
- It doesn’t sound like you’ll be able to restore purchases of games you’ve previously gotten; you’ll unsurprisingly have to buy all of your Stadia titles on the platform.
- You’ll be able to access games from YouTube streams, but there will also be an online hub for all your content and you can access games via links.
- The controller was nice and probably felt most similar to the design of Sony’s DualShock controller.
We’ll probably be hearing a lot more at Google I/O this summer, but with my first hands-on demo, the service certainly works and it certainly feels console-quality. The big freaking question is how Google prices this, because that pricing is going to determine whether it’s a service for casual gamers or hardcore gamers, and that will determine whether it’s a success.
Update: We were playing a level from Doom 2016, not Doom Eternal
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The 9 biggest questions about Google’s Stadia game streaming service
Google’s Stadia is an impressive piece of engineering to be sure: Delivering high definition, high framerate, low latency video to devices like tablets and phones is an accomplishment in itself. But the game streaming services faces serious challenges if it wants to compete with the likes of Xbox and PlayStation, or even plain old PCs and smartphones.
Here are our nine biggest questions about what the service will be and how it’ll work.
1. What’s the game selection like?
We saw Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (a lot) and Doom: Eternal, and a few other things running on Stadia, but otherwise Google’s presentation was pretty light on details as far as what games exactly we can expect to see on there.
It’s not an easy question to answer, since this isn’t just a question of “all PC games,” or “all games from these 6 publishers.” Stadia requires a game be ported, or partly recoded to fit its new environment — in this case a Linux-powered PC. That’s not unusual, but it isn’t trivial either.
Porting is just part of the job for a major studio like Ubisoft, which regularly publishes on multiple platforms simultaneously, but for a smaller developer or a more specialized game, it’s not so straightforward. Jade Raymond will be in charge of both first-party games just for Stadia as well as developer relations; she said that the team will be “working with external developers to bring all of the bleeding edge Google technology you have seen today available to partner studios big and small.”
What that tells me is that every game that comes to Stadia will require special attention. That’s not a good sign for selection, but it does suggest that anything available on it will run well.
2. What will it cost?
Perhaps the topic Google avoided the most was what the heck the business model is for this whole thing.
Do you pay a subscription fee? Is it part of YouTube or maybe YouTube Red? Do they make money off sales of games after someone plays the instant demo? Is it free for an hour a day? Will it show ads every 15 minutes? Will publishers foot the bill as part of their normal marketing budget? No one knows!
It’s a difficult play because the most obvious way to monetize also limits the product’s exposure. Asking people to subscribe adds a lot of friction to a platform where the entire idea is to get you playing within 5 seconds.
Putting ads in is an easy way to let people jump in and have it be monetized a small amount. You could even advertise the game itself and offer a one-time 10 percent off coupon or something. Then mention that YouTube Red subscribers don’t see ads at all.
Sounds reasonable, but Google didn’t mention anything like this at all. We’ll probably hear more later this year closer to launch, but it’s hard to judge the value of the service when we have no idea what it will cost.
3. What about iOS devices?
Google and Apple are bitter rivals in a lot of ways, but it’s hard to get around the fact that iPhone owners tend to be the most lucrative mobile customers. Yet there were none in the live demo and no availability mentioned for iOS.
Depending on its business model, Google may have locked itself out of the App Store. Apple doesn’t let you essentially run a store within its store (as we have seen in cases like Amazon and Epic) and if that’s part of the Stadia offering, it’s not going to fly.
An app that just lets you play might be a possibility, but since none was mentioned, it’s possible Google is using Stadia as a platform exclusive to draw people to Pixel devices. That kind of puts a limit on the pitch that you can play on devices you already have.
4. What about games you already own?
A big draw of game streaming is to buy a game once and play it anywhere. Sometimes you want to play the big awesome story parts on your 60-inch TV in surround sound, but do a little inventory and quest management on your laptop at the cafe. That’s what systems like Steam Link offer.
Epic Games is taking on Steam with its own digital game store, which includes higher take-home revenue rates for developers.
But Google didn’t mention how its ownership system will work, or whether there would be a way to play games you already own on the service. This is a big consideration for many gamers.
It was mentioned that there would be cross platform play and perhaps even the ability to bring saves to other platforms, but how that would work was left to the imagination. Frankly I’m skeptical.
Letting people show they own a game and giving them access to it is a recipe for scamming and trouble, but not supporting it is missing out on a huge application for the service. Google’s caught between a rock and a hard place here.
5. Can you really convert viewers to players?
This is a bit more of an abstract question, but it comes from the basic idea that people specifically come to YouTube and Twitch to watch games, not play them. Mobile viewership is huge because streams are a great way to kill time on a train or bus ride, or during a break at school. These viewers often don’t want to play at those times, and couldn’t if they did want to!
So the question is, are there really enough people watching gaming content on YouTube who will actually actively switch to playing just like that?
Photo: Maskot / Getty Images
To be fair, the idea of a game trailer that lets you play what you just saw five seconds later is brilliant. I’m 100 percent on board there. But people don’t watch dozens of hours of game trailers a week — they watch famous streamers play Fortnite and PUBG and do speedruns of Dark Souls and Super Mario Bros 1. These audiences are much harder to change into players.
The potential of joining a game with a streamer, or affecting them somehow, or picking up at the spot they left off, to try fighting a boss on your own or seeing how their character controls, is a good one, but making that happen goes far, far beyond the streaming infrastructure Google has created here. It involves rewriting the rules on how games are developed and published. We saw attempts at this from Beam, later acquired by Microsoft, but it never really bloomed.
Streaming is a low-commitment, passive form of entertainment, which is kind of why it’s so popular. Turning that into an active, involved form of entertainment is far from straightforward.
6. How’s the image quality?
Games these days have mind-blowing graphics. I sure had a lot of bad things to say about Anthem, but when it came to looks that game was a showstopper. And part of what made it great were the tiny details in textures and subtle gradations of light that are only just recently possible with advances in shaders, volumetric fog, and so on. Will those details really come through in a stream?
Damn.
Don’t get me wrong. I know a 1080p stream looks decent. But the simple fact is that high-efficiency HD video compression reduces detail in a noticeable way. You just can’t perfectly recreate an image if you have to send it 60 times per second with only a few milliseconds to compress and decompress it. It’s how image compression works.
For some people this won’t be a big deal. They really might not care about the loss of some visual fidelity — the convenience factor may outweigh it by a ton. But there are others for whom it may be distracting, those who have invested in a powerful gaming console or PC that gives them better detail at higher framerates than Stadia can possibly offer.
It’s not apples to apples but Google has to consider these things, especially when the difference is noticeable enough that game developers and publishers start to note that a game is “best experienced locally” or something like that.
7. Will people really game on the go?
I don’t question whether people play games on mobile. That’s one of the biggest businesses in the world. But I’m not sure that people want to play Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey on their iPa… I mean, Pixel Slate. Let alone their smartphone.
Games on phones and tablets are frequently time-killers driven by addictive short-duration game sessions. Even the bigger, more console-like games on mobile usually aim for shorter play sessions. That may be changing in some ways for sure but it’s a consideration, and AAA console games really just aren’t designed for 5-10 minute gaming sessions.
Add to that that you have to carry around what looks like a fairly bulky controller and this becomes less of an option for things like planes, cafes, subway rides, and so on. Even if you did bring it, could you be sure you’ll get the 10 or 20 Mbps you’ll need to get that 60FPS video rate? And don’t say 5G. If anyone says 5G again after the last couple months I’m going to lose it.
Naturally the counterpoint here is Nintendo’s fabulously successful and portable Switch. But the Switch plays both sides, providing a console-like experience on the go that makes sense because of its frictionless game state saving and offline operation. Stadia doesn’t seem to offer anything like that. In some ways it could be more compelling, but it’s a hard sell right now.
8. How will multiplayer work?
Obviously multiplayer gaming is huge right now and likely will be forever, so the Stadia will for sure support multiplayer one way or another. But multiplayer is also really complicated.
It used to be that someone just picked up the second controller and played Luigi. Now you have friend codes, accounts, user IDs, automatic matchmaking, all kinds of junk. If I want to play The Division 2 with a friend via Stadia, how does that work? Can I use my existing account? How do I log in? Are there IP issues and will the whole rigmarole of the game running in some big server farm set off cheat detectors or send me a security warning email? What if two people want to play a game locally?
Many of the biggest gaming properties in the world are multiplayer focused, and without a very, very clear line on this it’s going to turn a lot of people off. The platform might be great for it — but they have some convincing to do.
9. Stadia?
Branding is hard. Launching a product that aims to reach millions and giving it a name that not only represents it well but isn’t already taken is hard. But that said… Stadia?
I guess the idea is that each player is kind of in a stadium of their own… or that they’re in a stadium where Ninja is playing, and then they can go down to join? Certainly Stadia is more distinctive than stadium and less copyright-fraught than Colosseum or the like. Arena is probably out too.
If only Google already owned something that indicated gaming but was simple, memorable, and fit with its existing “Google ___” set of consumer-focused apps, brands, and services.
Oh well!
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