The big interview: Phil Harrison and Majd Bakar on Google Stadia

#News(General) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

In this extensive interview, I had the chance to sit down with Google VPs Phil Harrison and Majd Bakar, to discuss the principles of Stadia, how it integrates with YouTube, and why it may deliver the opportunity for a genuine shift in the kinds of games we play – innovations only possible with datacentre-based hardware. On top of that, we discuss what differentiates Stadia from Project xCloud – Microsoft’s Xbox One-based streaming set-up – and we also discuss specs in depth, with Google revealing what kind of hardware developers have to work with and how the firm is seeking to remove compute limits.

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And then there’s client-side hardware. Google isn’t making a console, there will be no local box that sits under your TV, and it has no intention of adhering to the traditional concept of a console generation – but there will be a new controller, providing some intriguing new features and built for optimal performance on a cloud system. The ‘gameplay over IP’ concept has been tantalising us ever since the launch of OnLive, but somehow the end experience never lived up to the promise. Can a global giant like Google deliver where so many systems have failed to gain traction?

That is exactly the way that we describe what we’re doing as a new generation, because it’s purpose-built for the 21st century. It does not have any of the hallmarks of a legacy system. It is not a discrete device in the cloud. It is an elastic compute in the cloud and that allows developers to use an unprecedented amount of compute in support of their games, both on CPU and GPU, but also particularly around multiplayer, where in a historical multiplayer context you are always – as you well know – gated by the lowest performing client-server relationship in your network and you have to optimise for that lowest level performance.

In our platform, the client and the server are inside the same architecture, and so whereas historically you’d be talking about milliseconds of ping times between client and server, in our architecture you’re talking about microseconds in some cases, and so that allows us to scale up in a very dramatic way the numbers of players that can be combined in a single instance. Obviously the go-to example would be battle royale going from hundreds to players to thousands of players or even tens of thousands of players. Whether that’s actually fun or not is a different debate, but technologically that is just a headline-grabbing number that you can imagine.

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