Alongside the announcement for Stadia today, Google also announced that it was opening its own gaming studio named “Stadia Games and Entertainment”. The search giant has put Jade Raymond in charge of the new game studio.
Raymond has expertise in this area as well. After being a top executive at both Electronic Arts and Ubisoft – two of the biggest game studios out there. Raymond didn’t say much about Stadia Games and Entertainment, but did say that the team will be working with both internal game developers and third-party studios. This likely means that the team will be working with other companies to bring their games over to Stadia.
One of the major advantages that Stadia Games and Entertainment will have over its competitors, is that the games it releases will immediately be available to over two billion people. That eclipses the number of users on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and even the Nintendo Switch, combined.
With the announcement of Stadia today, Google did not really mention any games that would be available on the platform. It talked about Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, which it actually beta tested last year on Project Stream. It also mentioned that Doom Eternal will be available when it launches later this year. Other than that, there weren’t any other games announced for this new platform. Which could be a big downfall. But with Google debuting its own gaming studio, that may not be an issue after all.
Google isn’t putting its Stadia Games and Entertainment studio in the hands of some Android engineer either, which means that it is definitely focusing on gaming pretty seriously now. Raymond, who is heading up Stadia Games and Entertainment has been a top exec at some other big game studios in the past, so she definitely knows the industry. And it’s about time Google has gotten into the gaming industry. For many years, it has sat back and let developers own the gaming aspect of mobile through the Google Play Store. It has offered up Google Play Games as a way to compete with others, and also save your games so when you move to other smartphones, you don’t have to start over.
Stadia is going to be streaming games through Chrome. Which is not a big surprise. The big surprise is the fact that you won’t need to worry about downloading games anymore. In a world where games are now coming out with larger and larger file sizes, some being over 60GB, that is a big deal. You can simply find the game you want to play and just hit “Start”. And you’ll instantly be able to start playing. Google is utilizing its own GPUs at its data center for Stadia, so you can get top-notch performance, even on something low-end – something it showed off during its keynote.
Google has stated that Stadia will be launching this year in the US, Canada and Europe, but did not mention when specifically that will happen, only that it will happen in 2019. So it could be as soon as next week, or as far down the road as December.