Gadgetory

this morning Google had their big GDC presentation that has been very hyped up and it turns out it's more or less exactly what a lot of people theorized though it certainly goes quite a few steps further so if you guys haven't been paying attention any of this news whatsoever Google has been hitting a lot at something they were doing gaming related and it turns out it's there an approach to cloud gaming this is something that we've talked a few times about in the past but always within the confines of Oh Microsoft might be working on this or here's ways that PlayStation is messed with the idea but here this is something entirely new that's going a lot bigger picture so the basic idea is that instead of Google making any kind of Hardware of their own like some kind of system they instead are making this platform called stadia and the way stadia works is you're playing games remotely connected to a server using a controller that connects directly to it rather than in a device and you can freely move about using it on different platforms whether that's on a television on your computer on a laptop even on your phone and the pitch the hope that Google has is that this is going to give you this very easy accessible experience where you could just simply click on a link to start up a game and it's gonna give you this 4k 60fps HDR visuals that'll run on anything because it's not actually playing on it it's just acting as a display device this is taking a concept that's been getting bigger and bigger over the last couple years and potentially is pushing games into a brand new future braising the concept of play anywhere the concept of play anywhere is something that really all three major gaming hardware companies right now have experimented with in one form or another just in very different ways for instance Nintendo has by far the simplest but also strangely innovative approach of making a handheld system that docks to a TV if you want to be able to have that at-home experience you can go between being at home or on the go with one system instead of having to stream anything PlayStation on the other hand kind of moves into the territory of streaming stuff but it's still very focused on using their hardware initially you could do things like use a PS Vita to play PlayStation 4 games on the go streaming from your system now they've opened it up a little more and you can use it with iOS devices they've also messed with cloud gaming to an extent but again it's still focused on using their services by using PlayStation now to play PlayStation games on your ps4 or on a computer now Microsoft has messed the least with this concept so far but they actually have one of the ideas in the works right now that's closest to stadia which is X cloud and even did a recent example of this by showing playing forts of horizon four on an android phone not by the phone actually running the game but instead playing it from one of their servers it's honestly the thing that Microsoft is very heavily trying to gear their own system towards I think there's still a goal in their part of still releasing their own new Xbox but also offer Xbox as a service outside of that so if that you want to play game streaming on say a computer or a phone that options there but if you'd rather use their own console you can do that too what if everybody in the world could play Halo what everybody in the world could play Red Dead Redemption everybody in the world could play the games what would we have to do in order to make that possible now while all of these scratches the surface of this concept of being able to just take your games and play them anywhere stadia definitely seems like it's pushing it possibly the farthest with a few little interesting tweaks of their own I think one of the coolest ideas that really came out of it was the concept of using the stadia controller which instead of smoking up to a specific device like oh you connected to your TV or you connect to your phone instead it just connects to your Wi-Fi and communicates to the data center directly that way you can play a game and change what device you're viewing it on and have it be one seamless experience you could be playing on your TV and then switch over to your phone doesn't matter the controller still connected to the same thing letting you play those games they're just acting as the display device and again this is a concept that has been explored before it's just that the technology is getting better and better that hopefully it's going to end up working really really well there's been examples in the past like on live and again with Playstation now where yeah people could stream games but it wasn't always the smoothest or nicest experience and even if it was working nice and smoothly you weren't necessarily getting the base-2 visuals according to Google however stadia is supposedly gonna be offering some pretty intense gaming experiences on all these different devices one specific example they gave is that the upcoming Douma turtle will be a part of stadia and that if you play using it you're gonna experience 4k 60 frames with HDR in a seamless experience which is a pretty insane goal to announce for something that's supposedly coming out later this year what's really crazy about this whole stadia though isn't just the simple concept of being able to stream games to all these different devices and you know constantly change platforms but all the additional links that Google wants to take it by I get into all the other platforms that they own the idea is to literally change the way people interact and change with games the concept they were very heavily pushing is this idea of bringing players developers and game viewers all together in one form and just making the entire experience different for instance the concept of being able to watch a trailer for a game on YouTube and at the end of the video not only could you click over to some other video but you could also just click to open a window and start playing that game right then and there another concept is that you could be watching someone live-streaming a game and they're doing something that's multiplayer and you could just click on a link right there people to join the lobby and get ready to play with them as well instead of having to boot up any other kind of system and have to try to figure out if you have the right game loaded installed and ready to go well I think there's a question hanging in everyone's heads of how exactly is this gonna really perform realistically you can't deny that there is a very very exciting future mapped out here I think in a very important debate to have is not whether or not this is something that will work but instead when it will work because honestly I do think this is the inevitable future that games are going to reach I mean just look at all the other media that we have right now television movies music all of it is no longer tied to any kind of specific hardware sure you might have a specific experience you want to do like see a movie in a theater but if you want to watch that on your phone on the TV at home on a tablet all that stuff is easily accessible and it just makes sense that games are going to go that direction as well and if there's any company that can pull this off to actually make this happen it has the infrastructure for it it's Google now is it something that's gonna be awesome when it releases supposedly later this year I don't know but a year from now two years from now it's a really amazing idea to explore you