This article comes from the public account Jiazi Light Year (ID: jazzyear), author DougLong, love Fan Er released with permission.
Cloud games must have cloud players, and cloud players must play cloud native.
Three years ago, a secret project was secretly launched in a small, two-story building in the Silicon Valley Mountain View Google campus.
It was originally called Yeti, but later renamed Project Stream. For this project, Google recruited thousands of employees for secret internal testing, and the internal testing time was more than one year.
On March 20 this year, this long-awaited project was finally unveiled at the 31st GDC Conference (Game Developers Conference) and was personally released by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. At this time, it has a brand new name: Stadia Cloud Games platform.
Sundar Pichai claims that this is “a new generation of gaming platforms created for the 21st century that combines playing and watching games.”
▲ At the 31st GDC Conference, Google CEO Sundar Pichai released Stadia
Many years of secret research and development, the CEO personally stood on the platform and chose to publish on GDC instead of Google I / O-this series of actions shows the determination of Google, as an “outsider”, to advance into the gaming industry.
The logic of Google shouting the industry, attracting ecology, and impressing practitioners seems to make sense: Want to achieve the same people in the “Number One Player”? Only the mechanics of cloud gaming can do it! Over the past decade, Spotify and Netflix-driven music and video streaming have finally entered thousands of homes.Wanhu, should n’t it be the next decade?
In the end, after a lot of calls, Google Stadia, which attracted the attention of many game developers and players, was officially launched last Tuesday (November 19, 2019) 8 months after the project was released.
And the huge contrast with the previous attention is that in the past week, Stadia has caused countless controversies.
▲ A selection of media reviews within a week of Stadia launching
While Google’s start was not smooth, a large group of people may be snickering.
Because the cloud game market behind Stadia is already in the race, players include:
- Blade Shadow, Jump, Vortex, Rainway, and other entrepreneurial pioneers with cloud gaming-related technologies
- Game host and PC platform vendor such as Sony, Microsoft, Valve (Steam), etc.
- Google, Amazon, Ali, Huawei, Telecom and other cloud computing service providers
- Game developers such as EA, Tencent, and NetEase
- Xiaomi and other mobile phone and TV terminal manufacturers
- Hardware manufacturers such as NVIDIA and HP
- …
- It is even rumored that Wal-Mart will enter the cloud gaming market.
It seems that at least everyone agrees with Sundar Pichai’s phrase, “Cloud games are the next generation gaming platform.” Behind a few words is a huge business opportunity.
This article will use Google ’s Stadia as an incision to expand some thoughts on the game market:
As a “barbarian” who is trying to invade the gaming industry with cloud games, has Google messed up this time?
What caused Stadia’s awkward situation? What positioning and timing does Google choose?
Why the cloud game market attracted heroes at this time? Who is the most likely?
Inspired “barbarian”
Let’s start with a brief history.
There are often wonderful reincarnations in the world. Just 10 years ago, at the 21st GDC in San Francisco, there was an eye-catching project like Stadia-OnLive.
This is the first true cloud game service. It claims to use network streaming media to transmit high-quality game pictures in real time. Players can play with various devices at their hands-computers, smartphones, tablets, TVs. 3A games that previously required high-end configuration machines to play.
This idea has attracted a lot of attention once it was proposed. During the GDC conference that year, OnLive was even searched more than video games. The walls of OnLive’s booth were also secretly pried open, just to see if their cloud game demo had been faked, and whether the mezzanine hidden a game console.
▲ OnLive demo is suspected at GDC: Are you such a cloud game?
In fact, Steve Perlman, the founder and serial entrepreneur of OnLive, practiced similar ideas earlier.
This geek who originally developed QuickTime video codecs at Apple founded WebTV Networks in the 1990s to provide services using a TV and remote control to access the Internet, similar to what is now called “smart TV”.
This idea that is more than a decade ahead seems cool, but it has encountered the typical cold start problem of the bilateral market. On the one hand, there was no APP and no responsive website at the time. It was a mainstream webpage designed for PC screens and mice. The browsing and interactive experience on the TV is difficult to satisfy, and the optimization that can be done from the perspective of the TV platform is very limited; on the other hand, the terminal scale of WebTV is too small to attract thousands of website developers to adapt to format.
But this time, it laid a foreshadowing for Perlman to start cloud games-WebTV is also a way to use the oldThe terminal device (TV) accesses new media content (Internet) to help users try to get rid of device constraints. The starting point of cloud games is the same.
Fortunately, this project was subsequently acquired by Microsoft for $ 425 million, which will become the basis for future Xbox. Perlman also got the capital to start OnLive.
▲ WebTV was fortunately renamed MSN TV after being acquired by Microsoft for $ 425 million.
But on OnLive, Perlman still hasn’t achieved his wish. It really came to the launch date in June 2010. Like WebTV, OnLive is also applauding. Of the 2.5 million registered users, only 1600 are online at the same time, and most of them are early adopters, and after the free period, they are lost.
In the case of self-built thousands of servers, costing 5 million US dollars per month, and little revenue, on April 30, 2015, OnLive Game Service officially closed the service after running for 1778 days, and some of its assets were sold Gave it to Sony.
▲ Some of OnLive’s assets were sold to Sony, and some of them were sold on the official website.
OnLive failed, but its thinking about the future of the game has affected many people,