▷ Google stadia: what it is and what it is for

GDC 2019, Google presents its foray into the world of gaming in society… or in other words: what according to this company will become (partially?) The world of gaming in the near future. Google Stadia is the key to gaming in the near future.

To put us in the background: Google Chrome was developed from its inception (10 years ago) to, among other things, be a web application platform. Within this functionality, it was already contemplated to host high quality games (the antithesis of the dinosaur game for when you are offline) but given the technical limitations of that time, they seemed unattainable to materialize… not to develop.

Things have changed in the last two years and Google believes that with the means available now, they can attack this pending point present from the original concept and that they have been developing for years internally.

October 2018, they carry out the public test ' Projet Stream ', in order to evaluate their ability to manage high fidelity graphics stream flows in their own low latency network.

The result of the test can be summarized as: 'they consider that they are capable of transmitting to any device that supports Google Chrome through its corresponding instance and is connected to the network with a minimum speed of 25 Gbps '.

And what has changed 2 years ago? Best of Google: Cloud + Network Infrastructure. Your Custom Server Hardware & Datacenters.

Google Stadia how it works

Google has been deploying its infrastructure network for more than 20 years, on which it mounts any service that it makes available to its customers (which are usually… the entire population of the planet with the possibility of connecting).

In his own words, ' your network offers more than any other competitor on the planet '. It has hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber optic cables that cover the entire world and they understand that this feature is the most important, if not the only one, that determines who can materialize the project we manage (besides them, of course). Traditional connection scheme to play online:

Scheme of 'direct' connection using Google Stadia.

Open Platform. For everyone

Google Stadia aims to simplify the requirements so that 'the user' can access the service, currently they see a majority that find barriers that prevent them from accessing the use of video games that demand high operating requirements.

They consider that comparatively to the current total community of video game users, the former are infinitely more numerous. And she is convinced that if at the time she has managed to get these types of users to consume YouTube content in a massive way and without even wondering what is inside the device they use, she can also 'play them'. Powered by Google and For Everyone.

The antithesis of the situation that we have had until just 1 year ago (Google Stadia is not the only streaming video game platform) in which there is a place for each way of playing or for each platform from which it is played. Disconnected. No possibility to interact with each other. With multiplayer / online possibilities but limited to themselves. Located.

Fragmented and independent, both as regards the players themselves and those who prefer to watch games. Google rubs its hands together before such waste and wants to seize the opportunity by taking over this niche (the size of Pangea).

For Google, developers are as important in all this as the players themselves.

For this reason, the company offers programmers their data centers as a platform (we will not go into whether in this scenario the figure of the Publisher can be bridged). With 3 main points on which everything pivots and will pivot: Create - Scale - Connect.

Reducing the friction between 'Hype over something' and 'accessing it NOW' seems too succulent not to pay attention to it. Like the hot purchase of a lifetime, but separated in this case by a click on a hyperlink and 5 seconds of waiting.

It would no longer be necessary to wait the days from the day of the announcement (triggering the Hype) until the game is available in the physical / online stores or more recently the download of the current file, its installation, its patching, its update. (interest in using it NOW).

Google Stadia is based on single code base, so there is no more than one version of each game to develop, maintain, update or patch. Developers should not think for a second about the limitations that could have in their project regarding hardware incapacity, this is what Google takes care of, that neither they nor the players experience a reduced, layered or different version than they had in mind when they developed it.

The platform is the Data Center, that of the developer and that of the player… and before they have indicated among the three premises 'Scale'. (On a Google scale, that is, a beast).

This slide may not attract your attention, but it is the most important of the entire presentation. It is the call to the creators of YouTube and RRSS content. As well as a direct look into the eyes of the developers. You really do not want to put to play and make income to all those people who have not yet given the gamepad? Look at the money that comes out when the only thing they can do is interact with videos, surely we can improve it using video games.

Google Stadia Controller

In principle in the conference it is emphasized that to use Stadia you simply need to have a device that is compatible with Google Chrome with a screen or that can connect to one (Chromecast) and that you can use the controls that you already have and that can connect.

Additionally, they will make available a specific controller (Google Stadia Controller) that has 'additional' functionalities that almost any other control you already have will have.

This command is capable of directly identifying in a unique way (for the purposes of a session on the server) the screen of the device you are playing on, taking care that you currently have the hardware resources assigned in the cloud, but also changing them from dynamic and instantaneous in the event that your 'configuration' mutates or changes.

It also has 2 buttons that are added to what we can consider as standardized on gamepads. The share button that represents a very powerful link to everything YouTube represents (both for youtubers, and for those who watch content), remember: Stadia is 'For everyone'.

The second button activates Google Assistant, is the equivalent of the Chrome search box but that captures content via an integrated microphone, gladly, sending everything we say to the data center, to process, compute and perhaps return something with which ' guide the user. The game begins with 30 lives. Konami are you there? Audio I / O.

On top of Google's Data Center Network

Google Stadia works on the infrastructure that has been solving for 20 years, in just milliseconds, absolutely everything that the whole world sends you without rest and without compassion.

Google announces that it is capable of offering powerful computing capacity (something that many others can offer)… close to users (something that everyone else does not, or at least not in massive quantities or independent of their physical location).

Its network consists of fiber optic links and submarine cables between hundreds of points of presence and more than 7, 500 edge nodes locations spread across the globe. Everything directly interconnected with its backbones network.

Or what is the same: 20 years of advantage over any other company that decided to compete with Google in this adventure that has been invented.

For comparison, at the previous day's Nvidia conference, Jensen Huang documented in 15 (Fifteen) Datacenters those available worldwide for his Geforce Now service powered by succulent Geforce RTX servers. It calculated in hundreds (100s) the number of simultaneous users.

Obviously they are two totally opposed visions of what to offer and above all how to monetize all this hoopla of video games in stream.

Insistently, the company reinforces the concept that no one has an even remotely comparable infrastructure on which Stadia will deploy to add to the existing regular services the video game with the highest technical requirements 'invisible' to users. No one has their number of nodes, which allows them to be close to all users and this closeness is what guarantees performance (latency).

Each point that makes up the Data Center network has interconnected racks with scalable amounts of graphics, memory and storage. Google will ensure that at each of these points the hardware is increased or 'updated' with the components it deems appropriate at the time they are available and also according to the load they support. In principle, users should not worry about anything, not even be aware of it.

Such computing capacity and above all flexibility, again Google, tells us that it can be attributed exclusively and that this architecture is the foundation of what they announce as 'the new gaming generation'. Tested and developed for years in the past. Reaching now what was absolutely impossible in the past, but capable of achieving in the future what is impossible today. Scalable and flexible.

" There will be no cheats in Stadia " (Phil Harrison)

YouTube (everything the service means) is omnipresent in Stadia, given the characteristics of the service there is no problem in using different instances of the data center to manage the computation of, on the one hand, the video game stream and, on the other, that of the broadcast of the game. Nothing about using the same hardware resources for both. Why? This could somehow limit performance and is something not covered in Stadia.

Video games can grow without worrying if they would need higher requirements than previously thought (Specified?). Players can also switch from playing in sessions that require some requirements to others. Dynamically and instantaneously Google will allocate resources from the cloud of the place that it considers optimal in its network of Data Centers.

On the left the button to call the assistant and on the right the one that we will use to 'share' in all possible ways today and those that are invented tomorrow.

As operating system they will use Linux. Like API Vulkan, Unreal Engine, Unity as game engine or Havok as middleware. The goal is to be absolutely flexible.

Redefining the multiplayer

Managing multiplayer video game deployment is something that has traditionally represented the use of time (money) by developers without actually understanding anything properly related to the actual content of the game. Google Stadia wants this to stop being the case, freeing studies from this task and catapulting the number of participants that we could currently identify as hundreds to reach thousands in the Battle Royals.

In order to undertake this, Stadia uses the direct connection between the ISP that provides customer service and its network, this traffic being isolated from the rest of the public internet. This is what is called skipping a lot of hops and who knows whether to do the same with the stack of network protocol layers they use compared to what they would use on the public internet.

Internally defined as 'low latency and perfect sync' capable of supporting hundreds of players.

Each player has his / her dedicated instance within the data center network that allow the stream to be managed in many different ways (again flexibility). Thus, the 'screen' of each player can be made up of one or more screens that are linked to their stream… or to other / s (without limit… or at least by Google, another thing is that humanly you are able to manage similar amount of independent information that is made up in a unified way on your display). Stream Connect or the 21st century multiscreen Google Stadia flavor.

Erin Hofman John, as Lead Designer of the R&D department in addition to this functionality, describes Crow Play and State Share that leaves no room for doubt in the importance of multiplayer (the largest number of users) for Stadia.

To be able to easily and instantly exchange the game, the moment, the state and to be able to continue it. Once or a thousand times. All the same or with variations. For whoever you want. It seems like a real candy for all that public that both enjoys on Youtube or YouTube.

They call it Create + Share + Engage. And it seems increasingly clear, that certainly, Google may have tools to cement what it intends to offer or the way in which users can obtain entertainment. Youtube is a much more important part of what in principle could have been thought, although they end the presentation ensuring that the Stadia store is 'the whole internet'. It does not need a specific one, any place is suitable to be able to insert the hyperlink that directs you to the game and any internet user can communicate with all the others with a multitude of tools.

It is reported that for the occasion Google has created its 1st party video game division with Jade Raymond at the helm (meh). Currently there are more than 100 studios with access to Stadia working so that their titles can be enjoyed on the platform.

And up to here it could be worth to document us with what they have put on the table. The truth is that if Sony entered in a big way when things were shared by Sega and Nintendo, and then Microsoft did the same by multiplying the resources to make a 'hole' in the video game sector, what Google intends to do It is the mother of all inputs.