Thursday, March 28

Stadia’s ambition has come to (almost) nothing: now it points to a “turnkey” service for companies


Stadia’s ambition has come to (almost) nothing. The service that wanted to propose a revolutionary gaming platform in the cloud – our analysis did not find it so revolutionary – has been running out of steam. Yesterday Google seemed to accept defeat and changed strategy with the service. He also revealed some additional news in the field of video games in Stadia and Chrome OS.

At an event for video game developers, the company announced that Stadia technology will be available on the Immersive Stream for Games service, which will be part of Google Cloud. Or what is the same: it is offered to other companies so that they can set up “their Stadias” with their own game catalogues.

Who has seen and who sees you

In this way, any video game developer will be able to take advantage of the work that Google had already done to propose its own video game streaming service. It is a way of not wasting everything that has been done these years, but also a symbolic surrender of Google against rivals like GeForce NOW, xCloud or Amazon Luna.

The service, called Immersive Stream for Games – rumors pointed to the name ‘Google Stream’ – thus becomes a ‘turnkey’ platform for companies that want to have a ‘custom Stadia’.

This approach was already released last year when the operator AT&T offered its customers the possibility of playing ‘Batman: Arkham Knight’ from the cloud.

It seems that in fact the own AT&T will soon take advantage of this service again with a game that can be played on both PC and laptop as well as mobile, something that will allow you to give more value to your 5G deployment.

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More news for a Stadia that opens its doors especially to companies

During the ‘Google for Games Developer Summit’ event, the company took the opportunity to raise other news. Among them was the open access to the ‘Click to Play Trials’ feature.

This option allows your partners to post video game demos on Stadia for any player — even those without an account — to take a look at those titles. Right now there is one such demo available: it is ‘Risk of Rain 2’, and you can enjoy the game for 60 minutes.

Access to the Stadia store is also opened, which you will no longer need to have an account in the service to check if the catalog meets our needs: the service will therefore continue to function as before, but it does so in a more open way, especially to video game partners and developers.

A second novelty is in the new tools that allow developers port games to Stadia. We already talked about the hypothetical Windows emulator for Linux, which is actually an initiative called ‘Low Change Porting’ (another hard-to-remember name).

This project offers improved support for the Unity and Unreal engines, for example, and there are already more than 10 developers like Paradox Interactive or Team 17 who are taking advantage of this offer to bring their games to Stadia in the coming weeks.

Your next console may not be a console, but a TV

Google did give keys to create this emulator so that each developer can better adapt their games, but it does not seem that they will have their own nor that they have announced the immediate support of Windows games.

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Finally, Steam is now available – yes, in alpha phase – on Chromebooks. The problem is not only that the feature is available in that preview format, but that in order for users to enjoy it will need to have a ChromeBook with 10th or 11th generation Intel Core processors: Not many computers of this type have these microprocessors. The initial list, in fact, is short.

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