At GDC 2019, we sat down with Google VP Phil Harrison to talk about Stadia, his company`s new cloud-based streaming service for video games. The platform will allow you to play all types of games, both triple-A and indie, from a variety of devices.During its GDC 2019 keynote presentation, Google announced Stadia will release within 2019, and come to the US, Canada, UK, and `most of` Europe. The only games confirmed for the service as of this time are Assassin`s Creed Odyssey and Doom Eternal. Harrison offered further details during our interview, including what exclusives will look like and what type of pricing model players can expect. He also confirmed Stadia will never support offline downloads.We have more information on how cloud gaming works, and have outlined the top companies investing in gaming`s possible cloud-based future. Read on for our full chat with Harrison.I assume you`ve been monitoring all of the chatter, the reaction so far. What do you think?Very happy with the way that our message was received and I think that there`s a lot of very thoughtful follow up which is starting to happen. It`s exactly what I wanted.There`s obviously a lot more to talk about in the months to come, but I wanted to start off with asking about latency and input lag. Are you confident that by the time the service is out, you`ll be able to satisfy most of those concerns around input lag and latency?Absolutely, unequivocally, yes. And we believe that it`s not just for when the server starts, it`s actually, we`ve demonstrated it today. Having a studio with a very, very high threshold of quality and functionality from [id Software] and having id on our stage yesterday was very purposeful, because the way [Marty Stratton] tells the story is spot on. They were skeptical when we first started talking to them. They were skeptical that a streaming platform could support the level of quality and responsiveness that they needed to deliver on their game experience. What they have d ...
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