095 THE FUTURE OF STREAMING. STUDY 01 GOOGLE STADIA“Playing games is fundamental to
being human,” she says. “People don’t
choose a new platform because they
love its technology – they go because
their hearts are touched. Would Xbox
have been a success without Halo?
We have to make sure that the core
gamers are our core fans and the people
we are delivering value to first.”
Raymond is creating a publishing
team to work with external developers
to make exclusive content for Stadia,
while also building Stadia’s own internal
game studio. Her move to the company
in March 2019 was widely seen as a boost
to Google’s gaming credentials.
Hoffman-John’s role is more
future-focused. She runs Star Labs, a
prototyping games studio on the ground
floor of the Stadia building. The games
she and her team build are intended
to explore what could be possible on
the platform. Currently, they are toying
with the idea of a dragon world – an
immersive wilderness where you find
a dragon egg, see it hatch and raise
the dragon to recognise your voice.
You have to feed and care for it – much
like a Pokémon – but can also ride it,
fight other players, form groups and
guilds, and carve out territory.
Growing up in San Diego, Hoffman-
John loved Dungeons & Dragons – the
original multiplayer role-playing game,
which used pencils and dice. When
the game came under assault from
religious groups – who feared that it
would convert players to satanism –
in the 1980s, her parents banned her
from playing. However, she discovered
America Online and its chat rooms
devoted to D&D. Soon she was building
worlds and running text-based adven-
tures on the computer instead.
At Stadia, her mission is to work
towards reaching the “next billion
gamers” – which is “something of a
concept for Google”, she says. “There are
nowhere near enough game developers
to reach a billion extra gamers, so we
need to radically widen the content
pipeline and the ability for developers
to really amplify themselves.”
The high development and marketing
costs of gaming can be fatal to small
companies, and the funding imbalance
creates a huge division between AAA
and indie studios. “The indies are known
for being very innovative, but often that
innovation won’t reach the market formany years – by which time the indies
are not there to benefit from it,” she
says. “If they could iterate very quickly,
throw out an entire level and make a new
one in a week instead of in three months,
then all of a sudden you get a lot more
swings at that problem.”
Cloud computing allows for cheaper
tools, which could make this kind of
iteration possible – and allow for more
options in-game. Hoffman-John gives
the telling example of character diversity.
“One of the reasons that we see narrow
demographics in gamers is representa-
tional... do I see people that are like me in
the game?” she asks. “If you can create
a character with 8,000 animations for
the same price as creating one with 15
animations, then you can suddenly have
hundreds more characters representing
far more demographics.”
Her team is also bringing some of
Google’s natural language processing
into Stadia’s game development tools
in a bid to create characters who
respond believably to individual players.
Currently, designers have to imagine
every possible conversation, and type
character responses in by hand. “What
I want is a character that is, say, kind of
neurotic, really likes ice cream and had
a really passive aggressive mother,” she
says. “The AI will create all the little tics
and patterns in the dialogue resulting
from that kind of background. Ideally,
that character would have a simple
memory so when you encounter them
hours later, they remember conversa-
tions they had with you.”
All of these tools, she believes, will
enable a crucial part of Stadia’s vision- to provide a liminal space between
games for players to be creative and
express themselves, and to construct
their perfect digital self.
Aside from games, Google is
counting on its not so secret weapon
to help attract developers and players:
YouTube. In 2018, users viewed over
50 billion hours of gaming content on
YouTube, making it the largest gaming
spectator platform in the world. This
may be small beer when compared with
the global television industry – a report
by Eurodata TV found that average TV
viewing around the world in 2018 was
2 hours 55 minutes per day) – but in
terms of a dedicated targeted audience
to whom developers can market new
games, it offers a huge opportunity.
Stadia plans to expand on this by
offering a feature whereby viewers
can easily jump into a game with their
favourite YouTube stars. It could also
work with video game trailers. Like what
you see? Just click and start playing.
The man in charge of this fluid viewer/
player interaction is Stadia’s director of
product, Andrey Doronichev. He gives
me a tour of the Stadia building, with
Willy Wonka-style rooms full of multi-
coloured controllers, and smaller suites
with huge sofas and large two-way wall
mirrors that allow the Stadia team to
observe people testing the system.
Doronichev recalls that, as a child,
he really wanted a new Star Wars game- Star Wars: TIE Fighter. So he worked
shifting manure at his parents’ farm to
earn the money to buy it. When he did, it
took two hours to copy to his computer –
and then he didn’t have enough memory
to run it. He had to wait six months for
his parents to upgrade his computer
before he could play it. “My job here is
to make that delay into zero,” he says.
Left: Erin Hoffman-John, a Stadia games
developer. Above right: a still image from
Destiny 2, the first free game on Stadia11-19-FTGoogleStadia.indd 95 13/09/2019 11:10