Google to Detail Stadia on June 6
Google will hold a "Stadia Connect" live streaming event on YouTube, wher the company will provide launch, pricing and game details about the upcoming game streaming service.
In a brief teaser, Google said that "Stadia Connect" livestream presentation will air on June 6, 2019 at 9am PDT / 6am EST / 5pm BST. On June 6, Google says, "the news about Stadia you've been asking for such as pricing, games, and launch details will all be revealed."
Google is hoping to cause massive waves in the cloud gaming space with the launch of Stadia, which will be based on the company's massive hardware infrastructure.
The Stadia console will be integrated with YouTube and ship with a traditional Xbox-style controller that connects via WiFi. It will also have a dedicated Google Assistant button. Using the Stadia Controller will let gamers tap into features like instant livestreaming of their play session to YouTube, but using Google's proprietary controller isn't a requirement. The company says any gamepad you already own should work.
The Google Stadia platform will be based on a custom x86 processor clocked at 2.7GHz, a custom AMD GPUs with 10.7 TFLOPs and HBM2 memory, 16GB of shared system RAM for both CPU and GPU, with a total 484GB/s of bandwidth. It will also offer SSD cloud storage and will run on Linux and Vulkan graphics API.
The Stadia data center can be stacked and expanded over time to support massive battle royale games. This means that you'll essentially have a console that upgrades on the cloud instead of in your living room.
Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Odyssey was used in the Google Stadia beta, and will launch with the service later this year.
Google hasn't provided much information about games at GDC earlier this year. The comapny announced Assassins Creed Odyssey, DOOM Eternal and "something" from Q-Games. The latter sounds interesting, since it could somehow incorporate Stadia's "state share" feature, which lets gamers jump into a game at the exact point they're viewing it via a YouTube video or even a current livestream.
The question hanging over cloud gaming right now is the bandwidth required for even a smooth, low-latency 1080p gaming experience. Google says that a minimum 30Mbps connection is required for the full Stadia experience, which is 4K/60FPS. But to enjoy 1080p gaming, Google lowers that bandwidth requirement to 25Mbps.
Obviously, there are millions of connected homes across the Stadia launch market already having that bandwidth in place. But still, that are not meeting these bandwidth requirements. Google VP Phil Harrison says that "when music streaming migrated to YouTube and Netflix streaming, once again the limits went up, and we expect that the limits will continue to rise over time."
Pricing is a still unknown, as is the launch window game library.