There has been a lot of talk about Stadia, Google’s upcoming streaming platform, ever since it was revealed at GDC a few weeks back. Some tend to believe that Stadia could be the future of gaming while others are hard-pressed to think it will find success in our current Internet climate where speeds are often capped or inconsistent across various regions.
During PAX East this past weekend, I had the chance to talk to Fallout creators and co-directors of The Outer Worlds Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky about their latest title. In the process of our conversation, I also brought up Stadia, to see what two industry veterans thought of the new platform and whether or not it was viable.
Right off the bat, Cain told me that streaming games, whether or not it’s through Stadia or otherwise, will come about in a big way soon enough. “I think something like that is inevitable [but] I’m curious if we’re there yet,” Cain told me. He expressed concerns that the idea of streaming games might be ahead of where the technology is actually at.
Boyarsky then jumped in with his own take, essentially mirroring what Cain said. “I just remember people tried to do online gaming before it was time for it. People tried to do things on the Internet just in general and everything crashed and burned. Five years later, everyone is doing it,” Boyarsky said. “Streaming, I remember when they first came out with streaming instead of getting Netflix discs in the mail and I was like, ‘Yeah, right. I’m going to watch this movie that’s buffering constantly?’ Like Tim said, [streaming] will happen it’s just who knows if it’s the right time yet.”
I then asked both directors whether or not the thought of Stadia or other streaming technology was alluring to them as developers. Boyarsky said that it’d definitely alleviate a fair amount of headaches that come with developing for multiple platforms. “If you basically have a super PC somewhere that runs just as good as if it were in your house that means that we don’t have to worry so much about lower end systems. If it’s cheap enough and everybody can do that, then people aren’t kept from playing your game just because they don’t have the best and the latest console or the best and the latest PC.”
While there are definitely positives and negatives to Stadia and game streaming as a whole, it seems like it’d definitely be something that developers might engage a bit more with open arms compared to consumers. That said, if consumers don’t take to a platform like Stadia, then publishers will probably never ask their devs to even develop for it.
As of now, no plans of The Outer Worlds coming to Stadia have been announced but the game itself is planned to launch later this year on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Stadia, meanwhile, is also planned to launch at an undetermined date in 2019.
The post The Outer Worlds Directors Believe Game Streaming is the Future but Don’t Know if Stadia Can Succeed Just Yet by Logan Moore appeared first on DualShockers.