Microsoft Exec Thinks Stadia Will Have the Infrastructure, But Not the Content

Google announcing their streaming service, Stadia has had interesting implications for the future of gaming, but there’s also been a lot of doubts and skepticism about the ability of the service to deliver as promised. That has mostly been fueled by the lack of significant demoing (despite reports that the demos they did have were real and that the platform will work fine). One such skeptic seems to be Microsoft’s Chief Marketing Officer Mike Nichols, who cast doubts on Google’s ability to deliver the content to drive Stadia to success when he did an interview with The Telegraph.

While he doesn’t doubt Google has the infrastructure to pull off Stadia, he just doesn’t believe they’ll be able to get the content to be able to compete. “Emerging competitors like Google have a cloud infrastructure, a community with YouTube, but they don’t have the content,” said Nichols.

He also emphasized that he believes Microsoft’s Project xCloud, with the company’s prior experience of a dedicated processing machine like an Xbox or a PC, will be preferable to an anywhere and everywhere approach. He said: “You won’t necessarily need a device over time, but you’ll get the best experience with local processing power.”

It remains to be seen how either service will fare, but there is no doubt that streaming is a big part of the future of gaming- however far off that future may be is something that is anyone’s best guess for now.