Google’s VP Of Engineering Believes Stadia Will Be Superior To Desktop Gaming And Other Hardware In A Couple Of Years

Google’s VP Of Engineering Believes Stadia Will Be Superior To Desktop Gaming And Other Hardware In A Couple Of Years
Credit: GameSpot Trailers via YouTube

The future of gaming is streaming technology. At least, that’s what Google hopes. They’re leading the charge in a novel way with their Google Stadia gaming subscription service. For a monthly fee, subscribers will have access to the top AAA games and they won’t have to invest in a premium console.

The requirements are simply a controller, some sort of mobile device or computer, and an internet connection. Google is expending all sorts of resources to give gamers seemingly more convenient gaming experiences. Can Stadia work though? That remains to be seen.

Many in the community have questioned how Stadia is going to work, especially in areas that don’t have access to strong internet connections. Google has remained firm in their beliefs that Stadia can revolutionize gaming as a whole. The VP of engineering — Madj Bakar —  has even gone as far to say that in one or a couple of years, Stadia could be superior to desktop gaming and gaming using other local hardware. That’s a bold statement when you really think about it.

Desktop gaming has been the premiere way to play games for a lot of people for decades. Can Stadia really rival and even surpass its capabilities? Bakar believes so and his confidence resides in a concept known as negative latency. Sounds fancy, but what does it mean exactly?

Well, it pretty much boils down to Google predicting which buttons players will press. By anticipating a player’s behavior, Stadia can get its prompts ready in advance and send over the correct responses. This way, players wouldn’t see any lag. Players would thus — in theory — have more streamlined and user-friendly gaming experiences.

That sounds like quite a complex strategy on the part of Google. It’s hard to doubt they can do it though considering how many resources they have at their disposal. If there’s any company that could figure out this prediction analysis and technology, it’s Google. It seems like they would have to rely heavily on machine learning.

All of these goals sound lofty, but we’ll just have to see how Stadia performs at release. It’s currently scheduled to debut worldwide in November. That’s right around the corner. It will be interesting to see how the gaming community takes to it out of the gate. It already has an amazing list of launch titles, which is important for any sort of platform like this. Let’s see if Google can help Stadia live up to the hype.

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