Friday, April 05, 2019

How will Google's Project Stadia Change the Digital Landscape?

Google has recently announced a new gaming platform called Project Stadia. The concept is you will be able to enter any complicated games that previously entail running on a separate hardware console, anytime, anywhere. What does that even mean? When we are talking about the "gaming people", usually they can be divided into two groups: the player who plays the game, and other people who watch the player playing. Stadia eliminates the process of purchasing Xbox or PS4 and downloading games from apps like Stream. When you are watching your favorite gamer livestream game-playing on Youtube, by clicking on a button / logging into Stadia, you can play with him / her on any of your devices. The second big feature is the gamer can share a unique link that includes the specific scenario in the game with all his / her avatars' assets at that particular moment. Namely, the gamer can re-create a scenario and invite / dare other players / challengers to finish through the bottleneck. By owning Youtube and Chrome, Google invented something a bit like the "Oasis" in the Ready Player One movie. Gaming is no longer a one-way closed activity - now it can be intercepted and shared to create new possibility. Right now the interface of Stadia remains unclear. But I assume games involving the interaction of players and "watchers" will increase since two hundred million users are exposed to game-related content on Youtube everyday - a number that I couldn't imagine before writing this post - it will be a waste if Google doesn't assemble these people in one place with the power of Youtube / Chrome / data centers / cloud server, and try to monetize that traffic from whatever means.

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