DREAM FACTORY
Never underestimate the power of a good demo. When Marc-Alexis Côté, who was then senior producer on Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, was told he was going to see Google’s new game-streaming tech, he wasn’t ready to be impressed. “I was a proud non-believer at the beginning,” he tells us. “But my boss forced me to go. He put me into a car to drive me to Montreal. I was like, ‘Why are you wasting my time? That stuff will never work.’”
Ubisoft, of course, loves to jump on new platforms with its games. From Wii to Kinect, it’s been first to market time and again, and Côté found himself getting swept up in the initial overtures of yet another partnership. “Google demoed it and I was rolling my eyes, wondering when I could go back and work on the game. Then they put the controller in my hand, and oh! I couldn’t tell the difference. They were streaming Doom from Toronto, using a connection from a phone, which was pretty remarkable. I couldn’t tell the difference. I was like, ‘I’m seeing the future now.’”
This demo led to Odyssey being the game used in Google’s Project Stream, a US-only cloud gaming beta which launched in October 2018, day and date with Odyssey’s multiplatform launch. Running until January 2019, over 100,000 players tried it, playing for 1.2 million hours combined. This was the first major test phase for Google’s entry into traditional gaming, which was finally named Stadia during GDC in March. Now Stadia’s launching for real, rolling out in 14 countries in November.
“Does everyone have the internet connection to be part of the future? We’ll know when they launch, I guess,” Côté says. “I certainly hope so.”
Around Stadia swirl many such huge questions. Is streaming a practical way to play games? What influence will a company like Google have on the game industry? What happens to ownership when games depend on remote servers to function? How will developers take advantage of its wider features? Is streaming an inevitable future? Is it good for games?
It will take months, if not years, for definitive answers to emerge. But Stadia could absolutely be the future. It could transform the way games are made. It could lead to new categories of design which are only possible when games run in data centres. It could change the way games are discovered and accessed. It could be the most exciting thing that’s happened to the industry, and the medium, for years. Or it could flop, leaving Google to abandon it, consigned to the same scrapheap as Google Glass and
