Google’s Stadia — The Cloud Promise Fulfilled
Google unveiled its Stadia game streaming service on March 19 to the excitement of gamers, streamers and game dev communities alike. In Google’s own words:
“Google Stadia is a new cloud gaming platform with its own controller. Stadia’s seamless cloud gaming platform offers tremendous scale, giving you the tools to push game development to new levels.”
If Stadia does what Google says it would, the above description is quite modest and abstracts the underlying mind boggling technical complexity. Here’s how it will work, let’s say you are watching a YouTube stream of a video game, and you find a particular game quite cool (they demoed Assassin’s Creed), the process to start playing the game is cumbersome. You will need to get to your gaming PC or console (PS, XBox etc.), buy it from Steam (or native marketplace), and then wait for it to download and install. Serious games are humongous in size and there is significant friction in this experience.
Enter Stadia. You just click on a link in the YouTube video and bam, 5 seconds later you are playing the game. No installs, no heavy consoles, no PC. That’s the real kicker, Stadia runs in the Cloud and streams the game in 1080P, 60 FPS, 4K right to your Chrome Browser. This seems like the original promise of the cloud. Stadia shifts the heavy lifting to purpose built Google Cloud instances and enables end users to enjoy a super thin client experience. It can run on PC, Mac, Android phones, Tablets, TVs etc., basically anywhere Chrome can run (no updates on iOS yet). You can even play on your PC and pick up the game on your phone or tablet later!
Stadia, if it does work the way Google has promised, is the ultimate Cloud promise fulfilled. A true GaaS (Gaming as a Service) platform that will disrupt the market.
The sheer technical complexity of this undertaking makes me dizzy. Games are the most taxing of any genre of software applications. They demand lowest latency, highest graphics, physics and data transfers, and super efficient HPC. Google promises to address these challenges through the power of its CLOUD, and most developers agree that GCP is much more powerful than AWS or Azure. Stadia, if it does work the way Google has promised, is the Cloud promise fulfilled. A true GaaS (Gaming as a Service) platform that will disrupt the market. This is Cloud Native!
Technically, Stadia instances are high bandwidth Linux (Debian) cloud machines with custom built AMD GPUs. It uses Vulcan graphics API underneath. To handle latency, Google uses its own fibre network to avoid the slow public internet. But there’s more! With AI integration, users will get Google Assistant built in for things like hints while playing a tough game level. Then there’s style transfer in real time! There’s also game state sharing; the list goes on and on.
From a CS perspective, this is the ultimate dream of any programmer. The applications of distributed systems, HPC, ML, Physics, Math etc. all in one product! I was giddy with anticipation about the possibilities. Even if this venture fails, the technical triumph that resulted in Stadia is sufficiently exciting.
In my view this is a quantum leap in how gaming will happen in future. Google has partnered with Industry behemoths to pivot this initiative. And this is only going to grow. Kudos Google!
Full Announcement video:
