While there is a healthy amount of skepticism surrounding the Stadia, Google’s new gaming platform that will be a streaming service, Google is offering some very interesting features and functionality that I nonetheless hope become mainstream with all systems in the future.
We already talked about Stadia’s integration with YouTube, where you can watch a streamer playing a game, and then join in with them (should they let you); however, there are some other cool features at play here as well. From a gaming perspective, Stadia has Google Assistant integration. This will be put to work by letting players use the Assistant to look up help for the game they are playing, and them receiving said help back, all without interrupting the flow of your game in the slightest.
A cooler feature is one developers will probably like—it’s called “Style Transfer”, and it lets developers change the art style of their game on the fly using machine learning. I can imagine this actually being put to some crazy good use in games like Destiny, where they could use this feature for events. It’s definitely a powerful tool, if one with not many universal applications.
Stadia launches later this year in the US, Canada, UK, and Europe.