Google announces Stadia game streaming service, promises smooth 4K 60fps playback over the cloud

Google’s vision for future of gaming is officially called Stia – a game streaming service that will allow gamers to play high-end AAA games (including soon-to-launch Doom Eternal) across devices over cloud. global search engine giant anunced Stia at its first-ever Game Developers Conference (GDC) keyte event in San Francisco on Tuesday with CEO Sundar Pichai himself taking center-st to kickstart proceedings. 

Google is promising console-quality gaming (4K at 60fps at launch, and 8K 120fps later) sans an actual console - Google is really touting Stia as a gaming platform for everyone and with it company is joining likes of Microsoft, Nvidia and Sony to end reliance on hardware upgres and stream high-quality games whenever, wherever. Stia will be launching in 2019 (an exact launch window hasn’t been anunced) in US, Cana, UK and Europe to begin with.  

Stia is in fact prime-time or consumer-rey version of Project Stream that me its debut in October last year alongside global release of Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Odyssey – but it was a beta release intended to test waters before a final rollout.    

Google allowed select testers to stream Assassin's Creed Odyssey to a browser (Chrome, to be precise) on a laptop or a desktop PC going so far as to claim "near-instant interaction between game controller with graphic degration" while playing game in a tab.   

Stia only takes things furr – to an all new level if you may. Since Stia is a platform designed for instant access of play over cloud, re will be multiple ways to access it – one being YouTube. Google says gamers will be able to launch AAA titles from within channels like YouTube in just 5 seconds (without any downlos and installs) and play m across devices (phones, tablets, PCs, TVs) at full 60fps. And it will be possible to move gameplay from one device to ar, all in real time. 

Although gamers will be able to use any controller, Google is also launching a dedicated Wi-Fi based Stia controller to tag along its service – needless to say, it comes with a dedicated Google Assistant button. 

Speaking of technicalities, Stia will of course lever Google’s massive infrastructure of data centers – that will in turn be powered by a custom AMD chip capable of churning out 10.7 GPU teraflops (for some perspective, most powerful gaming console in world, Xbox One X maxes out at 6 teraflops).  

It would seem Google is really looking to end dependence on annual hardware upgres (and allowing gamers to play demanding titles anywhere on any device including laptop, PC or mobile), touting streaming as future of gaming. With improvements in broband speeds in recent years, it’s a lot easier to fix or at least curb issues of lag and latency w – making game streaming a reality rar than a distant hope. 

But n, gaming platform can succeed without an exhaustive catalogue of games – which is possibly why Google is also launching Stia Games and Entertainment studio to develop first-party Stia games.