093 THE FUTURE OF STREAMING. STUDY 01 GOOGLE STADIAcompression use some sort of “codec”- a portmanteau word combining coding
and decoding. Stadia required a codec
that could send and receive data without
any buffering at approximately the
speed of light. Back in 2011, when Bakar
started work on the project, there wasn’t
a codec capable of the compression that
game streaming needed.
In 2010, however, Google had
acquired On2 Technologies, a small
codec technology firm in upstate New
York. Since it was founded in 1992, the
company had created a series of video
codecs called TrueMotion, designed
specifically for gaming – initially for the
Sega Saturn console. Fresh iterations
of the technology were known by their
version numbers; by the time Google
acquired the company, its latest codec
was VP8, speedy but poorly equipped
to handle high-resolution images.
Engineers then worked on VP9, which
deals with high-resolution images in an
innovative way – expanding sky pixels,
for instance, to fill more space.
“The VP9 codec is open, but in
Stadia’s case, we do special work in
the encoder that makes it super fast,”
Justice explains. “That encoder still
follows the VP9 standard format, so
every VP9 decoder out there can read
the streams. But our encoder is specially
optimised, making it much faster.
We put a lot of special sauce in there.”
In theory, this means massively multi-
player online role-playing games such
as Neverwinter or World of Warcraft can
actually deliver on the offer they seem
to be making. Currently, the massively
multiplayer element of such games
is in fact the result of a kind of online
smoke and mirrors known as “shards”.
In effect, developers balance the number
of players with available computing
power by dividing players into shards,
or subgroups, on different servers.
That means players are restricted to
interacting with a small subset of the
overall game community.
“There’s only enough computational
power to maybe render 50 or 100 people
on the screen, but really there are many,
many more people in that world – they’re
just in a parallel universe,” says Jack
Buser, Stadia’s director for games.
“But think of the creative possibility of
removing all those limitations. You could
have hundreds of thousands of people
on screen at a particular time – with the
potential for millions of people, jumping
in and out of a single instance in the
game anywhere you can place a link on
the internet. It would be one giant world
that goes on for decades, never turns off
and never resets. We’ve dreamed of this,
but it was always the kind of thing you
would only see in a movie until today.”
There is one fully functioning single-
shard game, called EVE Online, availableon Steam. It’s a community-driven
spaceship MMO game, where players
can explore, set up mining operations
and industries, plot and plan in an
ever expanding sandbox. The game is
slow moving and, for players used to
high-adrenaline action, can verge on
the boring – until, as happens every now
and then, massive events sweep the
game. In 2014, for instance, 7,548 players
took part in a 21-hour player-versus-
player battle known as the Bloodbath of
B-R5RB. In June 2019, a vast non-player
fleet of aliens attacked the majority of
players at the same time.
Stadia’s potential – and the thing
that sees the team’s faces light up – is
that it could offer an EVE Online-style
experience at Fortnite’s breakneck
speed. But first, it needs the games.Two people have been given the job
of overseeing content so compelling
that it will attract players to Stadia: Jade
Raymond and Erin Hoffman-John.
Raymond is something of a legend
in the industry, known as much for her
biker jacket as for her enviable CV. The
Canadian producer worked on The Sims
Online at Electronic Arts (EA), developed
Assassin’s Creed for Ubisoft, and helped
EA create its Star Wars games.Turning the tables: Stadia’s head of product
management John Justice (left) and head
of engineering Majd Bakar at Mountain View11-19-FTGoogleStadia.indd 93 17/09/2019 05:24