Google Stadia continues to make the rounds throughout the games industry, with fan reactions ranging from healthy skepticism to strong excitement for the cloud-based platform announced at GDC 2019.
Overall, though, in an interview with Variety Google Stadia VP Phil Harrison said developers and publishers alike provided ‘phenomenal’ support so far, including some ‘unexpected’ parties. More will be revealed about the studios supporting Google Stadia in the Summer.
We’ve had phenomenal support from game developers and publishers all around the world from places that you would expect and some places that you wouldn’t expect. You’ll see us share in the summer our launch line-up and beyond and you can make a judgment then as to how successful you think we’ve been. I’m super happy with the way we have built this out.
Harrison also revealed that the whole Google Stadia project was initially spearheaded by the internal Chromecast team, who wanted to see whether they could use their streaming technology for gaming.
Where Stadia started was actually out of the Chromecast team. They had had a huge success with Chromecast in empowering streaming of linear media, particularly TV and movie content. And then it was like, ‘OK, so we have this platform, what else could we do with it? Is there an opportunity for us to actually stream games through this technology.
The third piece of it was the networking fabric that we build into our datacenters. It’s not something that we talk about publicly, but we have some very leading edge, arguably the most leading-edge hardware innovation inside the data center.
Just joining those three things together into an opportunity to really accelerate into a very vibrant business.
Chromecast will be the main way to use Google Stadia with a TV. Alternative ways to play games through Google Stadia will include PCs (desktop or laptop), smartphones and tablets.
