In February, there were rumors around that Google wanted to enter the gaming sector with some sort of streaming service. These have become even stronger after the E3 conference in the US, because apparently Google is talking to a whole bunch of publishers about their games. That says Kotaku . The service is still called Yeti for now and it is still the intention that games can be played on any device. The games are then run on powerful machines in a datacenter and as a player you only get to see a stream from the game and your inputs are fed back.
Streaming is the future
Game streaming is becoming increasingly popular, because in addition to the existing services of Sony Utomik and Nvidia more and more major publishers are also convinced of the potential of streaming. You give it something, because because data has to be sent back and forth the games logically slower than you play directly on a console or PC. That ‘input lag’ is a problem for serious actors of action games, but it is being pushed back further and further with smart networking tricks.
Google wants to take big steps in this sector, and that includes hardware. In our earlier article there was talk about a (kind of) Chromecast, but nothing is being said about that now. There will be hardware, but whether that has to compete with power with the current generation of consoles such as PS4 and Xbox One or just having to be able to run a stream, nobody knows for sure.
Fighting in the market
It is clear that Google is serious: they have been working on this plan for years, as it turns out. At the beginning of this year ex-Microsoft and Sony-boss Phil Harrison was added to manage the gaming division and several people on the development and marketing side were bought from EA Playstation and other large game companies. There is now also aggressive behind game-studios to ensure that there will soon be a reason to use the service of Google. The latter is always the most difficult: there are dozens of companies, including Amazon, who have done their stinking best or still do to get a place in the gaming ecosystem, but it always sticks a bit because it is missing games that you will not get in all other places.
In that sense, hardware for Google is not that interesting at all, because the direction in which the games industry is going now makes the box where you play games less and less important. If Google can set up a technologically superior way of game streaming, it will be a completely different story. Then it is an interesting partner for the existing platforms and publishers, which would be a significantly better position than the umpteenth who wants to fight with Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft.