During this year’s Game Developers Conference, GDC, Google stepped forward and announced their next project, the Stadia platform. With it, all a player would need to do is have an internet connection and have Google Chrome installed to play high quality, triple-A games, regardless of what hardware they were using. Stadia is set to release closer to the end of this year.
Microsoft had already shared plans of wanting to release a similar project called Project xCloud. They never detailed when these plans would come to fruition, and it almost feels like Google beat them to the punch.
As such, competition is beginning to rise. You can tell from a recent interview Telegraph had with Mike Michols, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer for Xbox, on April 12.
“Emerging competitors like Google have a cloud infrastructure, a community with YouTube, but they don’t have content,” Michols commented. He meant by this that Google does not have the same ties and partnerships Xbox has been developing for nearly twenty years. Although, he did praise Google’s overall backing, as they have over 7,500 edge node locations and have the processing power to back-up their claims. However, such strength can only take you so far, especially when you’re dealing with other companies who want to get their product to their players.
There’s still a great deal of information we do not know about the Stadia, such as how deep the numerous partnerships Google claims to go in terms of collaboration, how often they plan to launch games from their platform, the payment structure to play games on the Stadia’s cloud network, and more.
As we learn these questions, we’ll have a better idea of how Xbox and other platforms can approach their cloud services. Not only that, we can further compare Microsoft’s concept to the cloud to Google’s, and see which stands out as the superior product.
