Ask Paul: October 22 (Premium)

Happy Friday, and an early Happy Halloween, since I’ll be traveling next Friday, and this will be the final Ask Paul for October. Here’s another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend a bit early.
Stadia as a back-end service
christianwilson asks:

AT&T is now offering customers access to a streaming version of Batman: Arkham Knight and the infrastructure is powered by Google Stadia. There are a few articles about it on 9to5Google if you haven't seen it.

Yes, thanks. I did see this last night and was considering writing about it. But for now, let me point you to the article I wrote back in February, So, We Should Probably Have a Little Chat About Stadia, where I discussed, among other things, the notion that Stadia would perhaps make sense as a back-end service.

“Amazon, Google, and Microsoft would see even more success if they simply created the back-end services needed for other gaming studios and then sold them those services instead of making them available directly to consumers … [Google does] offers back-end services for game publishers. But now that it has over a year of Stadia experience behind it, Google is also looking at those capabilities to third parties as well. It hinted as such in its announcement yesterday about killing off the Stadia Games & Entertainment Team (SG&E) … Google sees the success of Stadia, and thus the future of the service, as being contingent on its being able to sell this technology to third parties that will use that functionality in their own services, outside of Stadia.”

Obviously, I didn’t predict/expect this exact outcome, but it’s reasonable to assume we’ll see other partnerships like this. Google, after all, does have an incredible cloud infrastructure and, now, lots of experience with streaming video games online.

Arkham Knight is an interesting game to offer because, as of now, that game isn’t available on Stadia. It’s AT&T exclusive. This is the first example of Google’s “white-labeling” of Stadia technology and I think this is a great step for the sustainability of Google’s game streaming business. It does, however, suggest a fragmented future where game publishers, ISPs, television networks, movie studios, and your local pizza shop could offer their own streaming services, each with their own game libraries, account systems, and subscriptions.

Totally agree.

I was curious of your thoughts on this as I know you continue to test cloud gaming as it evolves.

I don’t think I’ll test this exact offering, but I do still have more to catch up on with that series, most notably with Xbox Cloud Gaming. Which, frankly, has been wonky enough for me so far that I’ve deliberately delayed writing about it. I should get on that.
Surface Pro X upgrade path
crunchyfrog asks:

Hi Paul. I hope you can advise me on an upgrade path to the release version of Windows 11. I have a Surface Pro X with a preview of Windows 11 s...