Google to grab the gaming industry cake with its streaming service

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Streaming services in music and video industries have filled the pockets of companies like Spotify and Netflix with hundreds of million in revenues. The ability to listen to music or watch videos anywhere anytime has revolutionized how we consume content.

Now the gaming industry is itching to march into the profitable market with Google's announcement to present its vision for the "future of gaming" during its Game Developers Conference presentation in San Francisco, the United States, on Tuesday.

They unveiled a video-game streaming platform called Stadia, a service that can allow users to play hit games on almost any device like a smartphone, a laptop, or a streaming box connected to the TV.

Jade Raymond, head of Google's Stadia Games and Entertainment, speaks on stage during a keynote address at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, California, U.S., March 19, 2019. /VCG Photo

The key files of the game and hardware processing are kept and run on Google's own web browser, Chrome. Via transmission from a remote data center, even players with low-end devices are able to enjoy a fluent gaming experience.

Google said playing video games will be as simple as pressing a "Play Now" button, with nothing to download or install.

The "waiting game will be a thing of the past," Phil Harrison, a Google vice president overseeing the new service, said during a keynote presentation.

One other thing that Google presented at the conference to its developer was the Stadia controller.

Stadia controller /Photo via Google

The wireless WiFi-enabled controller, according to the Verge, has a feel and texture similar to recent Xbox One gamepads. It features a USB-C port on top, a 3.5mm headphone jack on the bottom, and dedicated buttons to trigger Google Assistant-powered voice features and capture video of your gameplay.

Before streaming games were possible, you had to either spend money on a costly Xbox, PlayStation 4, or a much pricier gaming PC. And even that wasn't enough. The game had to be bought from a store and then downloaded, which sometimes took several hours.

So far, details about the price and available games have yet been revealed. They only said that Stadia will come to the market in late 2019.

Google's "Project Stream" which made its public debut last fall /Photo via Google

Google is not the first company planning to adopt such a business model in a market that is currently dominated by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo.

In 2014, Sony began to provide its streaming service PlayStation Now. Then the chip maker Nvidia followed suit by launching its GeForce Now product. In the near future, Microsoft is going to announce its Project xCloud service to diversify user experiences on the Xbox.

One of the potential obstacles in Google's streaming services is Internet speed. The "minimum speed" suggested for Project Stream is 10Mbps, and the "recommended speed" is between 20 and 25Mbps. For many, it's hard to reach.

What's more, the issue of latency, which is how fast a server based sometimes thousands of miles away will respond to your command, is also one major bottleneck that needs to be solved before the company starts offering products to their customers.

But luckily the gradual rollout of 5G technology worldwide may speed up the pace of the gaming industry.