Last night, March 19, Google conducted their own presentation at the Game Developers Conference. The essence of what is happening - a new video streaming service that allows you to play from any device without having to have a powerful computer or console, and a special gamepad for it.

If this is not enough, then Google represents a new gaming studio, run by Jade Raymond , a former executive producer of Ubisoft Montreal and managing director of Ubisoft Toronto.

Quick review of the presentation with screenshots - under the cut. Detailed text decoding may be a little later.

Please note that under the cut there will be a lot of images at a resolution of 1920x1080, creating quite good such traffic. Olso, I warned.

Other sources

On Habré it is accepted to read the text. However, in addition to the article there is a video and a pure audio podcast . They completely duplicate what is written in the text. Enjoy reading or listening!

Go!

The presentation was opened by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. He joked a little that he is not a gamer, but he plays fifa and cricket. And in general, they wrote the most popular toy in the world. He expressed his pride in his colleagues solving amazing tasks like AlphaZero, AlphaStar, Vamo.

Project Stream was just the beginning - a test for displaying high-quality graphics over the network.

This became possible because Google is now everywhere, generally everywhere.

All this happiness will be presented to more than 2 billion people using Chrome: PC, ChromeBook, ChromeCast, Pixel - and they plan to support more and more different platforms.

And so they make a new gaming platform for ALL. It is called Stadia.

Then Phill Harrison, a veteran of the gaming industry, a former PlayStation and Xbox top manager who joined Google as vice president and general manager, takes the stage.

A lot of words about how the separated worlds of those who like to play and watch will unite.

And Google, respectively, will provide power to developers to make it all work. He thanked Ubisoft as a frontier of new development technologies and the fact that they provided Assassin for the FullHD test with 60 FPS images :-)

At the presentation, expectedly sat Yubistov's main head - CEO and co-founder, Yves Giymo.

The overall vision of the platform is expressed in three words: create, scale and merge.

This vision is realized in several specific ways.

First is the “Play Now” button on YouTube. It allows for 5 seconds, without any downloads, get into the desired game. In general, without downloading anything locally, updates, and other unnecessary tinsel.

This allows you to quickly move to the game for those people who previously fell off the hook due to the many unnecessary actions.

The next idea is that the same game - and not least, the same game code and resources - are transparently ported to any type of screen.

"Your platform is a data center!" - says Phil Harrison.

In the course of the presentation, a stuntman enters the stage and starts playing on the built-in laptop screen, and then switches to the phone without leaving the game. Then - on a weak PC with a large monitor, then - on the tablet Google Pixel Slate (control - a new Google gamepad), and in the end - on the TV. It was really impressive.

Although it is not necessary to buy any special controllers and you can use the keyboard and mouse (especially as they are needed in some types of games), we are waiting for another bright novelty.

Look, this is the new gamepad Stadia Controller!

This gamepad connects via WiFi to the Google data center, detects your device and tries to tune in to it.

Pay attention to the buttons. Streaming to YouTube starts right from pressing a hardware button on a gamepad. There is also built-in voice control.

Next comes the head of the development of Stadia called Majd Bakar.

He tells quite already the expected things, that they have the most powerful network in the world, more than 7,500 special servers in the Google network - and therefore each player will be allocated more capacity than the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro combined.

This is a fairly stable, proven technology over the years, running on top of AMD's custom SoC, coping with 4k quality, 60 FPS, HDR, surround sound, the ability to scale up to 8k.

Technical specs of iron:

Just look at the face of this dude among the audience, when he heard it, his eyes widened as if from a dose of prohibited substances :-)

Stadia has a lot of chips, for example, the ability to throw several GPUs on graphic calculations at once and achieve insane performance in tasks like water simulation in real time.

Video streaming while working directly from the server and does not eat the resources of a weak client hardware.

There are also all the other advantages of finding a platform on the server, honest ping in multiplayer, large-scale state synchronization, and the absence of cheaters.

On the other hand, cheats right in the platform itself go to a new level. If you can’t figure out how to go further level in Tomb Raider, you don’t have to go to YouTube and search for a solution - you push the button right inside Stadia, and the solution is shown to you in the video without leaving the game.

And yes - cross-platform multiplayer. I wonder what Sony will say?

What is equally important for the developers: Unity, Unreal Engine and Havoc officially started hosting.

And now it’s super important: you can develop not only on their cloud, but also on your own cloud, and on your desktop gland.

Next comes Martin Stratton, executive producer of id Software.

He claims that porting Doom Eternal to Stadia took only a couple of weeks. Recall that once Doom became the first AAA game on the Vulkan API, and now it is used by Stadia, so porting did not take much time and effort. Moreover, they managed to get 4k, 60 FPS on the client.

Erin Hoffman John, Stadia’s lead R & D designer, is next.

At first there was a demo of a huge city map with complete destructible and solid state physics - the google cluster prokhaval did not notice it.

The second idea is to bring back the split screen, which has disappeared from use, including because it needs too many resources. Imagine a few people playing in the splitscreen, sitting on the couch in front of a huge plasma.

Similarly, you can share the screens of all team members in some group games that require a team game.

Then the developer of such games as Deadlight, RiME and The Invisible Hours, the head of Tequila Works named Luz Sancho, comes on the scene.

Together with the previous citizen they talk about the Style Transfer feature: you can start from the world of gray cubes, and then pull over any style using machine learning.

It was like this:

It became so:

The latest feature is demonstrated by Dylan Cuthbert from Q-Games.

The feature is that it is possible to rummage through the short link the current state of the game. Just like someone else’s YouTube link, you can open a video from a specific location, so the game can be opened, starting from a specific save.

Next comes the head of Youtube Gaming, Ryan Wyatt.

More than 200 million people log in to YouTube to watch something about games, or create some kind of content. More than 50 billion hours of gaming content was watched in 2018 only. The life of these people can be improved.

For example, here's a feature: the opportunity for 1 click to connect to the multiplayer of the tape drive, which you are watching. (For me, this feature is very strange, streamer is not necessarily beneficial to have such an opportunity, the game with subscribers can spoil everything ... good, Ryan promised that the feature will be fully tuned in the streamer admin panel).

Then one of the content makers, MatPat, enters the scene. Enjoys how all is well. Nothing new says, but his view transmits confidence.

And finally, the final news: now Google has its own game studio, Stadia Games and Entertainment. Which will be managed by Jade Raymond, already known for his work in Ubisoft.

Results

• Stadia.dev - for developers, Stadia.com - for players, Stadia partners - for partners.
• It will be launched in 2019 around the world, but not for the post-Soviet countries (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and there are no others).
• Streaming platform for devices running Chrome with fast connections.
• Own gamepad, which is not necessary to buy - anyone will do, and even a keyboard with a mouse will do.
• Great opportunities for developers and content makers. Developers can code not only in the cloud, but also locally.
• Huge and disappointing questions about the freedom to use software in the understanding of Richard Stallman.