full-price and discounted games in 4k
resolution and 5.1 surround sound.
From 2020, the company will offer the
controllers separately for £59 (though
you do not need a Stadia controller
to access the platform, which is also
compatible with other controllers or
a mouse and keyboard), and a Stadia
Pro subscription for £8.99 per month.
It will also start offering a second-tier
streaming subscription, called Stadia
Base, with lower resolution.
The first of the free games is Destiny
2: The Collection, and Stadia has
confirmed 31 other titles at the time of
writing, including Borderlands 3, Doom
Eternal, Football Manager, Marvel’s
Avengers, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon
Breakpoint, Wolfenstein: Youngblood
and Watch Dogs: Legion. All of these
titles are, however, available on other
platforms – in the way that the popularity
of Halo helped Xbox take off, Stadia will
perhaps need its “killer app” game.
Ultimately, the vision Stadia is trying
to sell to developers and gamers is a
kind of real-world Ready Player One – a
multiverse of games, linked by the cloud,
that players can move freely between,
possibly even using the same avatar
across game worlds. With streaming
becoming the default way to consume
entertainment – from music to video
and now gaming – does this herald the
end of the games console?
Sony is clearly worried. In February
2019, Sony’s chief financial officer,
Hiroki Totoki, said that cloud gaming
and video game streaming services
could threaten PlayStation, damage if
not destroy console sales, and require
a major investment in servers and
infrastructure management – an area
where Sony lags behind its rivals.
Microsoft is preparing to launch its
own streaming service, xCloud, with
public trials scheduled for October
2019, and Amazon is rumoured to be
considering a rival service. In a move
widely seen as defensive, console
rivals Microsoft and Sony unveiled a
partnership in May 2019, with plans to
collaborate on cloud-based gaming.
“Historically, gaming was defined by
the device you were playing on,” says
Kareem Choudhry, vice-president of
cloud gaming at Xbox and the man
who is stepping up to stymie Stadia’s
ambitions. “Music and video started
that way – now you listen and watch
wherever you want. Now it’s gaming’s
time. In mobile, music drove 3G, video
drove 4G – and gaming will drive 5G.”In a brightly lit conference room at
Mountain View, across the hall from what
looks like a student lounge – beaten-up
sofas, bean bags, gaming controllers
on every surface, and a huge screen –
Majd Bakar, the cheerful Syrian-born
head of engineering at Stadia, explains
how the idea was born. It started, he
says, with Chromecast – Google’s
dongle that allows users to stream
video or audio content from a phone or
computer on to a TV, launched in 2013.
“I joined Google from Xbox to develop
Google’s Chromecast digital media
player, but very rapidly it became clear
there was a significant hole in the
dongle’s offering: computer games,”
Bakar says. “It’s the largest single
entertainment industry in the world.”
According to the Entertainment
Software Association, global video
game revenue reached $134.9 billion
(£110 billion) in 2018. For comparison,
market research company The NPD
Group puts global cinema box office
revenues at $41.1 billion (up to $136 billion
when combined with home movie enter-
tainment revenue), and the International
Federation of the Phonographic Industry
puts the global recorded music market
at $19.1 billion. At the start of 2019, Netflix
told shareholders that gaming was a
bigger threat to business than rival TV
services, writing in its quarterly report
that “we compete with (and lose to)
Fortnite more than HBO”.
Bakar tried to get gaming to work on
Chromecast. “The problem was, how
can you get high-end, AAA games on to
a very low-end device?” he says. “Cloud
gaming was the obvious answer for us,
but as we learned more – and as we
understood the technology behind it –
we realised that it made more sense to
develop a cloud service that’s available
on any screen anywhere.”
The biggest challenge is latency – the
time it takes packets of information to go
from your device to the server and back.Even fibre optic cables have roughly a
one millisecond delay for every 200km;
if you’re in London and the server is in
Tel Aviv, and you have optical fibre all
the way, it would take about 30–48
milliseconds for the signal to return to
you – if the network wasn’t busy.
“For gamers, a latency of dozens of
milliseconds is the most you can have
to make sure that any delay is imper-
ceptible,” says John Justice, Stadia’s
head of product management. “That
means you don’t score worse in your
matches than before. The solution is
complicated and hasn’t been techni-
cally possible before, which is why other
services have struggled.”
Google’s first solution was to build
more data centres nearer to users,
but this wasn’t enough. There is also
the matter of data compression. Since
digital data was first compressed back in
1974 by a team at the University of Texas,
there have been two options – “lossy”
or “lossless” compression.
With lossless compression, every
bit of data that was originally in the file
remains after the file is uncompressed.
With lossy compression, encoding and
decoding discards some of the data
to reduce size, using inexact approxi-
mations to recreate the content. Lossy
compression is the way companies
such as Netflix and YouTube can deliver
apparently real-time video, but most
streaming services use some level of
buffering – meaning the video sent
to your screen is some way ahead of
your viewing. For buffering to work,
Netflix needs to know what the next
few minutes of video you’ll be viewing
are, and send enough of it so that you
never catch up with the decoding of data.
Failure to stay ahead of the viewer leads
to the dreaded “loading” screen.
In game streaming, buffering is all but
impossible, as the player interacts with
and changes the content on a second-
by-second basis. All forms of lossy11-19-FTGoogleStadia.indd 92 17/09/2019 00:56