Google Stadia is Coming Back
Remember Google Stadia? Google would really appreciate it if you did. The initiative was (keyword: was) an inventive bit of technology, letting anyone from any device play any game, through a live stream recording of gameplay processed on a faraway server. Your device needed only act as a viewing screen. But sadly, Stadia didn’t really stick the landing. But Google still has plans for the technology, and in a recent ‘Google for Games’ Developer Summit, they made those plans known.
Imagine, if you will: a game ad – embedded in a page, in a youtube video, following a QR code, and so on. With one click, no signup needed, you just… start playing a demo version of a game before you buy it. Right from your web browser.
That’s Google’s plan for Stadia. A system to let people easily and quickly access game demos whenever they want. The demos can have any number of restrictions on them – maybe you can only play for an hour, maybe you can only experience small parts of the game, and so on. All that stuff designed to give you a quick taste of a game would be designed by the developers, and would be largely identical to how game demos work today. But with Stadia’s technology, they’d be so much more accessible. And you have to admit… this idea shows a lot of promise.
But Google isn’t just recycling the tech. They also want to make it so much easier for developers to get their games (and their game engines) running the way Stadia needs. It’s an issue that came up before, and is one that Google wants to erase.