Google reportedly planning to launch a game platform

It looks like Google is planning to launch a game streaming service to take on the likes of PlayStation and Xbox. We’ve been hearing rumors of a subscription-based game streaming service — codenamed Yeti — from as far back as February, with the company said to be working on an Android-based gaming console to complement the streaming service.

Google has been exploring video game initiatives for most of the decade. In 2014, the company was reportedly poised to acquire Twitch before Amazon swooped in. Rumors percolated for years that Google was also attempting to launch an Android-based console, similar to Amazon’s Fire TV, but that didn’t happen. In 2016, the Google-incubated studio Niantic scored one of the biggest gaming successes of the last decade with Pokémon Go, but it had spun out into an independent company the year before. And Google has a long history of hiring game developers for projects that never quite materialize.

A streaming service eliminates the need for beefy hardware, as the processing is done elsewhere. That’s the same approach NVIDIA took with its own game streaming service, GeForce NOW, and it looks like Google is trying to emulate the same strategy. Offloading the hardware component to the cloud allows any device to play visually-intensive titles, and while previous attempts at making such a service scale to a wider audience have failed, if there’s anyone that can sort out the technical details, it’s Google.

Another feature that Google is allegedly working on is tight integration with YouTube. If you’re stuck at a particular part of a game and need a few hints, you’ll be able to activate an overlay with the press of a button that brings up a walkthrough of that game on YouTube. That sounds like a neat idea, but once again we’ll need to see how it works in real-world scenarios.

As for the gaming console that is rumored to accompany the streaming service, details are light on what sort of hardware it will offer and what dedicated games it will offer. One of the reasons NVIDIA’s Shield works so well for gaming is that it has a dedicated library of games optimized for the platform, and it remains to be seen if Google will take a similar approach.

For now, Google’s game streaming service sounds like an ambitious idea, but the company has been known to abandon endeavours that don’t meet its expectations. It’ll be interesting to see what comes out of this project, but the idea of a subscription-based game streaming service from Google certainly sounds exciting.

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