We got a few more spilled beans about Google Stadia on Thursday, the streaming game service that will run on the Chrome browser. We now know how much it will cost, how it will work and around the time it’ll come out (this fall). We know less about Apple Arcade, the competing gamingservice. Apple’s far more vague, only confirming at this week’s WWDC event that Arcade will be available “later this year.”
Here’s some of what we learned: Google Stadia players will be able to subscribe to the service for $10 a month or use the service for free by buying individual games. Google’s service will work a bit like Netflix, where you stream games to your devices, with Google’s data center handling all the processing. And Google will have a Stadia game controller that will connect via Wi-Fi to Google’s services and offer dedicated buttons for sharing gameplay on YouTube and for seeking gaming help with a Google Assistant button.
For both Apple and Google, streaming games are a new frontier that takes the wild popularity of gaming apps a step further. High bandwidth fueled by faster Wi-Fi and the upcoming 5G networks have the potential to make streaming games possible with advanced graphics and very little lag. Tapping into the zeitgeist of gaming also opens up more revenue streams by giving Apple and Google ways to charge subscription fees.
For Apple especially, the push into gaming is part of a larger effort to provide services tied to its hardware. Its games service, video-streaming platform and even Apple Music all are compelling reasons to remain loyal to Apple’s world and use an Apple device. For Google, it’s about the cloud, and its gaming platform plays to its strengths, letting players take part in cloud-based gaming and then share gameplay through YouTube.
Read more at cnet.com