The tech giant best known for its search engine and Android operating system for smartphones now seeks to take a stab at revolutionizing the $100+ billion gaming industry currently dominated by incumbents like Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. As Google seeks to diversify its revenue sources beyond digital ads, gaming presents a massive opportunity for the company.
"Cloud gaming will enable publishers to broaden their reach even further by potentially taping into new audiences on any device and any screen," Forrester vice president and principal analyst Thomas Husson told CNBC."Beyond music or video, gaming represents another opportunity to offer recurring streaming revenues for companies in the gaming ecosystem.
While there's already an understanding of how Project Stream worked, there are still lots of questions around how Google's rumored"Yeti" console will operate. Since the processing is expected to occur remotely in the cloud, Yeti may be a simple piece of hardware — perhaps just a controller and streaming box that connects to your TV — that lets users stream games instead of playing them locally on traditional gaming console.
NVIDIA also offers a similar service called GeForce Now that works on Macs, PCs and NVIDIA's own Android-based Shield console for TVs. The service includes a library of 400 games, which normally require beefy graphics cards and expensive gaming rigs to play. But GeForce Now is limited in scope and is still considered a beta product.
In Google's case, its gaming cloud service will need to make sure it's able to serve up those games fast enough, too. Nobody wants to play a game that doesn't immediately respond to commands from a controller. "Google has somewhere between a little and zero exclusive content today," Ward said."I don't see how they get very far without making massive studio investments, and without making massive gamer community investments, and both are out of the company's wheelhouse."Microsoft and Amazon have their own gaming plansGoogle's biggest headwinds may come from Microsoft and Amazon, which are said to be working on similar streaming game services.