Most people agree that cloud-streamed games is going to be the future of this industry, but many of those people also agree that it’s going to take a few years before we can get to that point. Upcoming services like Stadia offer mouth-watering potential, but possible issues such as lag, latency, bandwidth issues, and a lack of infrastructure might stand in the way of their immediate success.
Google, however, has been bullishly confident that that’s not going to be the case. Not too long ago, for instance, they claimed that multiplayer on Stadia will be “way better” than what consoles could achieve, and now, Google’s VP of engineering Madj Bakar is saying that that’s true for more than just multiplayer games.
Speaking with Edge in their issue #338 (via PCGamesN), Witshite claimed that in the not-so-distant future, Stadia will have games that will be faster and more responsive than games on local hardware like consoles or a PC.
“Ultimately, we think in a year or two we’ll have games that are running faster and feel more responsive in the cloud than they do locally, regardless of how powerful the local machine is,” Bakar said. The operative phrase here is “feel more responsive”, because Google plans on using clever techniques to circumvent issues that a streaming service could face- such as negative latency, which would entail sudden boosts in frame rate to reduce latency, or even predicting player inputs through massive datacentres.
It’s a bold claim- to think that a platform that is streaming games to a screen that is not running those games would have faster games than consoles that have local hardware to back up their software seems a bit farfetched. Either way, Stadia is launching in parts of the world this November, so we’ll at least get an idea of how close Google is to achieving that vision.