Microsoft Has Huge Advantages Over Google in Game Streaming (Premium)

Google’s entry into game streaming garnered a lot of attention. But more attention needs to be paid to those areas where Microsoft and Xbox come out ahead. It’s a big list.

Put simply, Google’s Stadia announcement was a sneak peek at the core of what Microsoft will reveal about its very similar Project xCloud service in June at E3. But there are some key differences between the Google and Microsoft approaches. And in total, they point to a coming victory for Microsoft.

Stadia does have two apparent advantage over xCloud, and both bear some scrutiny.

The first is something I suspect was a surprise to the Xbox team: The Stadia controller features a uniquely Googly design in which it is directly connected via Wi-Fi to the Stadia service instead of the traditional approach in which a controller is directly linked to some hardware end-point for a service (like a console, a PC, or a mobile device).

This direct connection, Google claims, offers “the best possible gaming performance” because it reduces latency/lag. It also enables the gamer to more easily move from screen to screen. For example, you could be using the controller on your 4K TV at home and then continue playing the same game, in the same place in the game, using the same controller, but on a smartphone or other display-based device.

Google also cites other unique design elements of the controller that I don’t think matter all that much: It features a Google Assistant button (and microphone) so you can get in-game help from Google, a task most gamers accomplish on a separate screen (phone, PC, whatever) today. And it has a Share button so that gamers can “instantly capture, save, and share gameplay,” a feature that is already common in today’s game services.

Second, Stadia also does a neat job of abstracting the end-point that gamers will use—a PC, mobile device, or smart TV—from the actual service, and it does this using Google’s ubiquitous and proven Chromecast/Google Cast technologies. As Google noted during its GDC keynote, all a gamer needs is a device that can run Chrome—meaning the Chrome web browser or “can connect to a Chromecast”—and they’re good to go. Well, that and a controller.

We don’t know exactly how Microsoft will tackle this problem. An alternative approach would be to create native clients on supported platforms. That would be a mistake: Though native clients would be technically superior to Google’s all-streaming approach, where literally all of the heavy lifting happens in the cloud and your end-point is just a dumb, remote display, the complexity of maintaining multiple clients would make that approach untenable.

Given this, I expect Microsoft to mimic Google’s approach and not make multiple native xCloud client apps. But this is something to look for: If Microsoft does go with the latter approach, this will be an advantage for Google too.

Beyond those two concerns, there is nothing unique to Stadia that Microsoft cannot and will not duplicate in Project xCloud. It will work with a variety of heterogeneous clients and will scale according to the user’s connection speed and latency. It will offer fast start capabilities, and will leverage the power of the firm’s extensive cloud-based datacenter infrastructure. At a basic level, the two services will be functionally identical, I bet.

That leaves us with Microsoft’s advantages over Google. Which are many.

Unlike Google, Microsoft has decades of experience in the video game business. That means it has long-established relationships with developers, game makers, and game publishers big and small. It has three generations of Xbox console games that it can bring forward via its proven Backward Compatibility and Xbox Play Anywhere technologies. It has online services like Xbox Live and Xbox Game Pass that can move seamlessly to this new platform, taking tens of millions of dedicated Xbox gamers with it. And it has established first-party game studios, and dozens of hit game series, from Minecraft to Halo to Gears of War to Forza and more.

What does Google have?

Two industry insiders it hired to help guide its way. Virtually no relationships with game developers, game makers, or game publishers of any size, beyond the mobile-oriented Google Play world. It has no games. No studios. No experience. No mind share with any of those entities at all, let alone with gamers of any kind.

It does have YouTube and the millions of people who watch, but not play, games via that service. But watching and participating are two different things. I may watch crime dramas on TV, for example, but I don’t want or expect to pick up a game controller on a Thursday night and start solving crimes on my own. No one does: Watching is a passive activity.

To those who are worried about Google’s entry into game streaming, I’ll say this: You are right to pay attention to this. But you need to put the enormity of what Google is trying to do in perspective. And remember that outsiders can’t just instantly will themselves into new markets. For Google specifically, I’ll just point to the epic failures of its existing entertainment services, beyond YouTube, which, let’s face, it most people don’t even associate with Google. Did you even know that Google has services for e-books, audiobooks, music, TV shows, and movies? No one else does either.

Xbox, meanwhile, is a tremendous and established gaming brand with tens or hundreds of millions of dedicated fans.

Think about it. There is nothing that Google can do that Microsoft can’t do as well. But there is likewise nothing that Google can do to overcome the huge gap in experience, mind share, content, and industry relationships between it and Microsoft. This is Microsoft’s market to win. And there is nothing that Google can do about that.