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...