Google to Enter Video Game Market with Streaming Service, Console
- Mehedi Hassan
- Jun 29, 2018
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Google is getting ready to enter the video game market. The company’s been rumoured to be looking into entering the video game market in the past, but it seems to be full steaming ahead at this point in time. Kotaku recently reported some of Google’s plans, revealing what seems to be a bold strategy from the search giant.
The company is reportedly working on a streaming service, codenamed Yeti, that will allow gamers to stream games without actually installing them on their device. It will work much like Nvidia’s GeForce Now, which effectively offloads the compute-intensive tasks to its own servers, so you can play big games on your laptop with low-end specs.
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For the streaming service to work, Google will need a lot of games, and publishers that make new games. The company has reportedly been in talks with multiple game studios, and it could be planning to make a number of large acquisitions. Moreover, it’s also been trying to get some game studios to sign-up for its streaming service, while continuing to approach others for potential acquisitions.
The game studios, combined with the streaming service, could be the two core building blocks of Google’s gaming hardware. It’s not clear what exactly the company is building, whether it’s a high-end console like the Xbox One X or a low-spec one that’s capable of offloading compute-intensive games to Yeti. That would give Google an edge over the current gaming consoles, but a lot of people don’t have access to good internet connections, which will most certainly constrain the platform’s potential.
It’s extremely hard to predict whether Google’s gaming platform will work. For one, companies have been trying to take on Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo for years — and almost all of them have failed. And second, Google will need good games, a lot of big-name gaming studios, plus a solid platform and hardware for everything to actually work out perfectly. Even for a large company like Google, that’s going to be incredibly difficult to plan out, build, and grow.