Google Stadiaー one of many projects initiated by Google that have recently joined the Killed by Google hit lists, have been suspected to be resurrected. According to the article by Wall Street Journals, Google is being heard to currently testing out an online-games offering that is integrated into YouTube.
Wall Street Journals cited that the rumour was first heard from an internal email sent to the employees. The email signals an interest for Google, the parent company of YouTube, to push its platform beyond just as a video hosting service into games that can easily be played and shared between its users.
From the description, this will likely be another Google attempt at reviving a Stadia-like platform as it shares a really close similarity, which is being a platform that allows users to play its game libraries through a cloud-based streaming service.
Not Google’s first time
This is also not Google’s first time as well in an attempt on reusing the Stadia technology as for the last couple of years there has been a rumour about Stadia being another flop. Since then Google has been shifting its focus on this technology to make it open for other companies who wanted to partner up with them and use this streaming service.
One of the companies that showed interest was Peloton, an exercise equipment company that in July 2021 announced its interest in creating an in-app fitness game. Unfortunately, this project has not seemed to go anywhere.
The Stadia itself has been pulled off the plug since September 2022 when Google Stadia’s general manager, Phil Harrison, admitted that the service has failed to gain the expected traction ever since its launch back in November 2019. He told:
“A few years ago, we also launched a consumer gaming service, Stadia. And while Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service.”
New Stadia
According to the rumour, this new product that resembles Stadia is called “Playables”. Google Playables lets users play games through mobile devices or desktop computers through a video streaming platform.
Currently, there has yet to be any clear info about whether Playables will adopt the same technology that Stadia used or whether it harnesses the same capability to run Google Stadia games. However, with how recently other companies such as Microsoft’s Xbox and NVIDIA have succeeded in launching a platform that shares similar features, Google might have learned a thing or two to avoid the mistake that Stadia did.
Not to mention that this time around Google decided to integrate the idea to YouTube, a currently unchallenged best streaming platform instead of limiting itself to Google’s own ecosystem.
Bottom line
Google has been rumoured to resurrect its now-deceased cloud gaming service, Stadia and integrate it into YouTube. It was first reported by Wall Street Journals that through internal emails, Google seems to be showing an interest in pushing YouTube beyond just a mere video streaming platform.
Dubbed as Playables, this new product aims to let users play games through either mobile devices or desktop computers by utilising a cloud-based streaming service. It is currently unknown however whether Google Playables will have the same if not bigger scope in its game library as Stadia was in the past.
To keep up with up to speed, Google Stadia was a project that aims to innovate gaming by making games accessible to all platforms regardless of its specification by technically streaming the game to the users. However, instead of traditionally watching a stream, the users have been given the power to control the “streamed video” mimicking normal gameplay.
Unfortunately, it got shut down in September 2022 as it failed to gain enough traction to justify the service. There are plenty of reasons that stop Stadia from thriving such as the latency between user inputs and what the game streamed as well as Google limiting the accessibility of Stadia to its ecosystem only.
