News

Google announces a new game streaming service, called Stadia

80 Comments

At GDC 2019, Google announced its new game streaming service that will be called Stadia. Stadia is basically an evolution of Project Stream that Google launched last year. In other words, this isn’t a new console hardware. Instead, this is a streaming service and Google has released a trailer for Stadia that you can find below.

Google Stadia is designed to run on everything from PCs and Android phones to Google’s own Chromecast devices. It will support Android, iOS and Windows, however, it has not been confirmed yet whether console games will be also supported. Because otherwise, this is just “another” PC game streaming service and nothing mind-blowing.

Not only that, but assuming that both Xbox One and Playstation 4 games are supported which at this point seems unlikely, we also don’t know whether Google Stadia will allow PC players to game with their keyboard and mouse for these particular titles.

Google Stadia will support 4K/60 with HDR, and will allow players to stream up to 8K with 120fps. Yeap, Stadia will support 8K resolutions when those become widely available.

Stadia will be using Linux and Vulkan, and will take advantage of a new GPU from AMD, offering 10.7 of Terraflops. As such, Stadia will be capable of offering more raw power than both Xbox One X and PS4 Pro.

Google has also announced a new controller for Google Stadia!

Google will also have first-party games, though more details about these games will be revealed this Summer (since it will have first-party games I guess this won’t be a PC game streaming service. Instead, developers will have to port their games and develop them for Stadia alongside the Xbox One, PS4 and PC versions).

Google Stadia will release in 2019 on select countries!

80 thoughts on “Google announces a new game streaming service, called Stadia”

  4. Thats a good point we will not own anything, and as you have said looks like its mostly aimed a kids who like to watch other people play. The whole PewDieCrap gen.

    Reply

  9. Begun, the streaming wars has. If the people featured in this video is a sample of google’s stream army, they have already lost. What a bunch of degenerate freaks from San Francisco.

    Reply

  10. I would take gaming on a freakin’ potato PC or traditional console that I actually OWN over ANY sort of game streaming service ANY day of the week.

    Every time someone utters the word “service”, I almost throw up in my mouth a little.

    Reply

  11. They keep trying to perfect this for their benefit, not ours. The cons far outweigh the pros. I dont think I need to relist them all here.

    Reply

  12. Except most people dont have access to the kind of internet speeds
    required to take advantage of streaming videogames this way. And even if you do youre talking about spending 150+ a month on internet, thats not cheap.

    Reply

  15. Some MORE info, just for reference. Though this streaming service doesn’t seem to excite many gamers.

    “Google explained a bit how this service will work. It said that, if someone is watching a video of a game on YouTube, they could hit a button that says”play now” and jump right into playing the game themselves in as fast as 5 seconds. Today, gamers have to buy physical games or wait, often hours, for the game to download before they can play. Even then, they also need special hardware to play those games”.

    Google also says Stadia will run on “any screen type” but, at launch, will work on desktops, laptops, TVs, tablets and phones. There’s no box at all.

    “With Stadia, the data center is your platform,” Google said. A gamer can start on one platform and then pick up where they left off on another devices, which means you might game on your computer and then continue on your phone when you leave the house.

    People will be able to play with a keyboard and mouse or a special Stadia controller that Google will sell. It has a capture button that lets people share their games right to YouTube so that other people can watch. It also has a Google Assistant button, which gives access to the microphone for speaking to in-game features that developers will be able to build into their games.

    Google said it will support 4K games at 60fps with HDR but that, in the future, will support games up to 8K resolution.

    One of the first games supported will be Doom Eternal from id Software, which will support 4K with HDR at 60 fps. Every user will get a single GPU with no other users.

    Reply

    1. So this mean people with Intel hd graphics can play Doom 60fps using this “service”?

      Reply

    2. A bit of more info: Custom AMD GPU to Power Google’s Stadia Gaming Services…

      Custom AMD high-performance Radeon datacenter GPUs for Google Stadia include:

      Second-generation High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM2) to provide power savings
      in a compact footprint;

      Critical datacenter features such as Error Correcting Code (ECC)1 protection to
      help ensure data integrity;

      Fast, predictable performance with security features for cloud-based gaming, via the industry’s first hardware-based GPU virtualization solution built on industry standard SR-IOV (Single-Root I/O Virtualization) technology.

      http://ir.amd.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amd-radeontm-gpus-and-developer-tools-tapped-new-generation

      https://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-amd-custom-gpu-stadia-gaming,38865.html

      Reply

  16. Oh a streaming service! it’s like everyone has 100mb/s+ fully stable connection! also Google talking about content creators is quite a joke considering Youtube state since they brought it.

    Reply

  17. If this will allow me to play Bloodborne, and not having it look like utter crap as it does with PS Now, I’ll give it a try.

    However it does seem too good to be true. My take is, only a handful of games will work with it.

    And as others have said my guess is it will have some sort of Netlfix like pricing, pay for a year or monthly, and pay premium for new releases, also as others have said you will probably need an amazing internet connection to make it look decent.

    Although they did say they will have Stadias or whatever in several countries across the globe.

    Reply

    1. I think the bigger issue with BB is the framerate, but I seriously doubt they will get Sony first party games.

      Reply

      1. I hear you, is a shame that game never got released on PC, it would look beyond amazing. Every time I played it on PS Now that was all I could think about. That game was made to run at 60 fps 4k.

        Wonder if they will remaster it for the next gen sony console.

        Well at least Sekiro comes out on Friday!

        Reply

  18. Streaming means you don’t own your games
    Streaming means you’re dependent to a 24/7 internet connection
    Streaming means you’re dependent by the hardware and servers of a company
    Streaming means you can’t modify the games
    Streaming means you can’t insure that the games will be playable in the future
    Streaming means companies own your a*s and that you don’t own sh*t

    Tell Google to f*koff, tell streaming to f*koff
    (outside streaming the games you actually own)

    Reply

    2. Imagine getting you entire Google account disabled mid-session, lose access to your whole library and not even being able to pirate the game if you misgender someone or punch a feminist NPC in a game. Imagine having your gameplay constantly monitored and your data sold to third parties. Imagine being forced to watch ads at every checkpoint.

      Reply

      1. The punching a feminist thing is a reference to the youtube channel that got taken down for an RDR2 video where the guy punched a suffragette NPC.

        The misgendering bit is more of a twitter thing, the absolute quickest way to get banned from twitter these days has to be misgendering someone, hell, it’s even faster than posting real, credible death threats. Well, posting “learn to code” might be equally as fast tbh.

        Reply

      2. A woman in the UK got arrested and put in jail for misgendering a trans “woman” on Twitter. This stuff is not fiction; it’s real.

        Reply

      6. F**K THAT!
        I want full control over my stuff, and should be able to play offline without internet connection or interruptions! Just like I despise Apple and their overpriced and overhyped crap products!

        Reply

    4. Yeah but:
      Streaming means I can play my games anywhere
      Streaming means better accessibility for mainstream crowd
      Streaming means better scalability, and more GPU and CPU power for better looking games
      Streaming means no day one downloads
      Streaming means no more patches

      You can clutch to your games grandpa, but the gaming landscape is not what it once was and the sooner you accept it the better it will be to swallow this reality.

      Reply

      1. Everything stated there is irrelevant because you’re forced to use an internet connection, the internet connection has to be high quality and companies can pull the plug on you at anytime.

        F*king mobile games are more consumer friendly than that, I hope those 5 bucks from Google were wroth it.

        Reply

      2. You can play anywhere with Steam Link, there’s also family sharing.
        If you consider yourself mainstream, why are you on a PC gaming website? We build our machines here.
        You realize you will be held back by Googles partnership with AMD right? That means no upgrades, no new hardware, no RTX, no new Intel processors. At the rate technology is going by the time Nvidia reveals their RTX 2180 Ti or 3080 Ti this Stadia thing will be behind.

        How does streaming get rid of day one downloads and patches? What if you are streaming the game and a new patch comes out? Since when does Streaming means Bethesda will stop putting out broken and bug filled games?

        And as others have said this will mean nothing unless you have an amazing Internet connection. And even then, I doubt streaming something will look as good as the real thing running on your own hardware.

        But hey maybe this is aimed at you, more power to you.

        Reply

        1. Hi, you made some good points there. However

          1- PC gaming is pretty mainstream, but all gaming platforms currently dwarf compared to Mobile gaming market
          2- Who said only Google is allowed to cloud stream? Attempts have been made in the past with Onlive and similar services and I can bet that Microsofts “Power of The Cloud” is not as dead as people think. Both Sony and Microsoft will likely try to head in this direction in the near future, giving us more competition in this market so Google will have to compete as well, thus making sure innovate and upgrade their hardware.
          3- Stadia Streaming DOES mean no more patches. Devs have to do figure that stuff out behind the scene. Customers will only have to go to the store and select the game they want to play, since its only a stream, the game will be updated on Stadias’ end.

          Reply

    5. I don’t like streaming but you don’t get the point, streaming is a service, not a shop, is like netflix, you pay to play and that is it. Yeah, the gameplay is pretty awful with ping, 30fps for sure and medium graphic maybe. But some people don’t want to own games, they want to play without spend in hardware or get the game, just pay a service and play a bunch of tittles, like netflix. And you don’t own games in steam either and you depend on them, the only place you can get your games and store it locally is GOG.

      Again, I don’t like it and I am not going to use it, but I understand it, I want to play in my hardware with good graphics, 60+ fps, etc, but some people don’t want to spend a lot of money to play plus buy each game and I understand that.

      Reply

      1. Check out Digital Foundry’s new video on the topic for some more detailed specs. Some key points,

        – is a “gaming layer that sits on top of YouTube” so image quality will feature similar artifacting and compression issues to when viewing videos on YouTube

        – latency is still a problem even on a mega-fast 200mb/s internet connection

        – latency on a simulated 15mb/s internet connection was much worse

        – equivalent to gaming on a PC with a 2.7GHz CPU and boosted AMD Vega 56 GPU

        Reply

          1. Interesting. I’d probably rather see MS win in that two-horse race. They’d be the lesser of two evils.

        2. I’m on your side but this is false. Project Stream was the open beta test for Stadia. It had none of the god awful video issues caused by Googles trash YouTube compression. Image quality was perfectly fine, but the actual graphics settings were set server side to medium.

          Also, 200mb/s isn’t fast. That’s pathetic. If you’re saying 200 megabytes a second, yes, that’s literally so fast it doesn’t exist for 99% of people with internet. 200 mbps, terrible.

          Also, no. I have a 125 mb a second connection and again, Stream was completely flawless. There was no visible latency issue whatsoever.

          Digital Foundry is great but, it’s wrong.

          Reply

    7. The presentation was excellent and almost had me convinced then I realized what we will be losing if this becomes the future.

      Reply

  19. I ran the numbers and in order to even HOPE to compete with my personal expenses for PC gaming they would have to offer this service at a subscription fee of less than 15 bucks a month. Considering that they have huge up-front expenses setting up the data centers and software to run it all I doubt they can offer that price initially. And even if they did I would never consider it because I use my computer for other things besides gaming. If there was a deal for general VM streaming that would be more interesting but even then the price would have to be competitive because “you can’t do anything without an internet connection” is too much a risk.

    Reply

  20. “and will take advantage of a new GPU from AMD, offering 10GB of Terraflops”

    Slight correction for the above typo error. It’s not GB, but 10.7 teraflops of GPU power, over 56 compute units/CUs (graphics performance/horsepower).

    Reply

  21. People don’t get it, like mostly here I don’t like streaming, but do you know there is people that is not like you that don’t want to spend money in hardware and buy each game to play a couple of times? Do you know that some people don’t care about ultra graphic and 60fps or own the game, they just want to pay a monthly fee to play a couple of hours in the week, use it like Netflix?

    For some people (not me, not you) pay a fee to play a bunch of games for fun, is fine and better than spend 200, 300 or even 1000 usd plus the games to play?

    Reply

    1. It won’t be that much cheaper, you can’t do anything with it beside play the games they offer which look and play worst (even fastest connections will creat a noticeable input lag), we had this before an it failed, so those people don’t exist otherwise Onlive wouldn’t have died.

      Reply

      1. We had this and we are going get this again and again and again because is how the service is going to be in the future, lot of company are pushing in it, based on studies, analysis, predictions, putting a lot of money on it. Is still green, but is how they need to sell the product, there is a problem with hardware business wise, distribution wise, and the way to sell things, like physic copies in console gaming, is like a pain in the a*s for companies. Again, I don’t like it, but is not for me, and is not for you, is not for people who want to play the game locally, is not for who is willing to spend money on hardware. This is for other kind of people. And “this” is the technology, the streaming service, now, I don’t know about this of google because google makes things more ambitious than they can manage it, I don’t know what google is trying to do here, but the “services” of streaming, cheap (in Argentina there is one, cheap, couple of game, way more cheaper than buy games separately, and the delay is “ok”, the price is a little more than netflix). this kind of service, is for other kind of people and is a good deal for that kind of people, but they need to push it to get all those people who are willing to play but not willing to pay expensive hardware. See what happened in the cellphone market with games.

        Reply

        1. >we are going get this again and again and again.
          I agree, this never stops until they turn everything in their favor and even then it’s not enough for them but i don’t agree with the mentality that says it’s not bad or some people need this, no, no one on the planet “NEED”s this.

          >like a pain in the a*s for companies.
          Not really, they print or put it on a server to sell, they make all the money even more than they deserve, no pain at all.

          >is not for who is willing to spend money on hardware.
          Again, no. it’s for publisher having all the control period. buying hardware will be cheaper than this.

          >the delay is “ok”.
          No, it never will be. with the best connections in their own test it has a huge latency impact on games. we are not talking about 2D or facebook games or some random assets loading from a server.

          >other kind of people and is a good deal for that kind of people.
          No, those people aren’t exist. as i said earlier, they tried it and it failed because no one wanted it. they will push more and more but again and again, same problems.

          >See what happened in the cellphone market with games.
          100% unrelated.

          Reply

          1. You had no idea about business. This is better for companies because is easy to get people in, because SOME PEOPLE DON’T want to spend an initial cost to play. That is why you have a MASSIVE grown in gaming since cellphone fever, because people ALREADY has phones and the games where mostly free initially, a lot of these people bought consoles or PC to play, because of that, and you can see how much the market grown.

            This is the same, companies wants more profit, more people to sell their items, more people who pay their services, if you need to sell a console (distribution, publicity, enginering, building,etc) to sell games, is easier to sell a service and that is it. People is more willing to pay less and then much, than much and then less.

            Again, I DON’T like it, but you need to understand how business works, and this kind of thing is pushed by people who analyzed the market.

            And is not, is not unreleated because you say so, is a quest to get casual gamers and more public. Prepare yourself because in 5 years you are going to deal with this, because is how is going to be.

  22. It’s DoA or at best we will have another EpicStore crap with it’s own exclusives and it’s own exclusive problems like Input Lag, server porblems etc…

    Reply

    1. That’s the thing though, with streaming, the customer-publisher relationship becomes so unbelievably one-sided in favor of publishers, that they will try anything to force people intro streaming, no matter how sh**ty the service is, you will simply be given no other choice and nothing short of legislation will dissuade them.

      Reply

  23. No thanks, i rather owns my games and not be dependant on internet connection especially in my country the latency will be unbearable.

    Reply

  24. This is for people who like to press a button and have everything work. They will buy a subscription, forget they have it, barely ever play anything, and google will make money off them until they realize the subscription is active or they die.

    Reply

    1. MY MONSTER PC RYZEN 1700 16 GB DDR4 3200MHZCL15 GS KILL RIP JAWS GTX 970 G1 GAMING DELLP2416D 24” 256X01440 60HZ IPS WILL RUN IT MAX SETTINGS 1440P 30+ FPS WITH MUCH BETTER GRAPHICS THAN ALL CONSOLES LIKE DOES ALREADY IN ALL GAMES!!!

      Reply

    2. On Twitter, GameSpot’s Michael Higham reported that “it was running in a low latency mode but input lag was very noticeable” when tweeting about the gameplay demo. Not a good sign for Google’s first official showcase of Stadia.

      Video footage has also started circulating which showcased a surprising amount of lag when Stadia was used to play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, showcasing a notable time delay when the player attempted to climb a structure.

      This has reignited concerns that Stadia will continue to have issues with lag when the service launches later this year.

      https://twitter.com/michaelphigham/status/1108086085077237760

      Reply

  28. Ya, sure. I’d love to have visual fidelity take a step backwards 10 years. Who has ever seen a “streamed” game, and thought, “Hell, ya. That looks awesome!” ?

    This is to say nothing of the accessibility issues that streaming brings up. Your entire collection, and access to it, is at the whim of a company, who can modify ToS at any given moment, and pull everything out from under you, just as a quick.

    Google can go f*** itself. Right along with any other “streaming” garbage.

    Reply

  31. “Google announces a new game streaming service, called S…”

    …afe Space or SJW Pandering, if that cringe worthy video is anything to go by.

    Muh representation! smh

    Reply

  32. Right. I’m sure grandma and grandpa will love this.

    Anyone with an IQ that is at least beyond single digits, won’t touch with for the life of them.

    I can’t think of one good reason to use this trash. Not one.

    Reply

  33. DId you guys see their official site, it says “The future of gaming is not a box”!
    SO F**KIN’ LAME!! XD

    Streaming game services are pathetic, and not at all for true gamers! For casuals and all the lameness that comes with that, like all those retarded party games, yeah they can have fun with it!

    Reply

  35. Yet another failure in the making. It’s not even that 4K 60 fps streaming without compression and lag is impossible. It’s that a 4K 60 fps gaming system right now costs around $3000 and price only goes upwards when you start including custom components – and that’s just for one guy to play a game. No way they are ever going to break even.

    Compression, cutting graphics settings and faux resolution due to upscaling (how it works on “4K” consoles) would lower the hardware price but that would defeat the whole purpose and downright sucks as OnLive demonstrated once.

    Reply

  36. Terrible. Google seems to think this service is somehow going to just magically exist because they willed it to be.

    The world doesn’t have the broadband infrastructure to support this. South Korea? Northern Europe? Sure. North America? No.

    Not to mention everything that’s been said here already., No mods, no cheats,. no ownership, no tweaks, no ini changes, no trainers, no map editors, no SKSE, no total conversion mods, no access without internet, nothing.

    This is what publishers have been waiting for for 10 years or more to try to force customers into a subscription based ecosystem where they have no control whatsoever over anything. Combine this with the current terrible broadband ecosystem where ISPs can totally F you with data caps and such and it just doesn’t even make sense. Their modes of profiteering directly conflict with each other.

    I’m not sure where you get the idea this is its own platform where games need to be ported? It’s clearly going to stream the PC version of games. They wouldn’t have invested in the infrastructure and figured out how to stream the PC version of Odyssey just to throw all of that away and start from scratch. There just will also be Google exclusive games.

    Reply

  38. Dear JOHN,

    I know you have already covered an article on Google Stadia, but some latest news has been confirmed. Just check whether it’s worth publishing or not ?

    Google has been somewhat vague on what exactly powers Stadia game streaming, such as the CPU (which we can probably assume is a quad-core Xeon), and the GPU that it just described as a custom AMD GPU armed with 56 compute units and HBM2 memory.

    Khronos, the organization behind the development of the Vulkan API,recently listed Google’s Stadia platform under a list of “conformant products” (GPUs that use Vulkan). The description for Google’s GPU reads “Google Games Platform Gen 1 (AMD GCN 1.5)”, which tells us that Google is using the 1.5 version of AMD’s Graphics Core Next (or GCN) family of graphics architectures.

    Every generation, AMD has bumped up the version of GCN from 1.0, to1.1, to 1.2., and so on. It currently sits at version 1.5.1, which denotes 7nm Vega. However, Google is using GCN 1.5 for Stadia, not1.5.1.

    Google’s GPU has the same 56 compute units as the Vega 56, but it seems AMD bumped up the memory clock speeds to match the Vega 64 (which has 484 GB/s of memory bandwidth).

    Google’s specifications do mention the Stadia GPU has 16GB of RAM, but considering that it says “up to 484 GB/s” of throughput, it’s likely Google means there’s 8GB of HBM2 VRAM on the GPU and 8GB of standard DRAM on the motherboard.

    https://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-stadia-amd-vega-gpu,39375.html

    https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-products/vulkan#submission_354

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *