With Stadia, Google’s introducing an immaterial gaming console

For thirty years and more, along with tv sets, game consoles have been a constant presence in living rooms. Stadia, the first Google gaming service, shrinks them to just a controller. The future of this industry is in the cloud, and Mountain View is not the only big company working on that. PlayStation Now is Sony's streaming service, while Microsoft has been working for a while on something called Project xCloud. 

Google's recent debut in gaming was called Project Stream, based on the popular Chrome browser. Gamers could stream and play the recent Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Stadia is the next step, a virtual console that will launch later this year in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and most of Europe. It will bring games, including AAA titles, to every display, from smartphones to TVs, with 4K resolution at 60fps. Stadia will get a big advantage by the new superfast 5G networks. Doom Eternal is one of the first titles announced for the new gaming platform.

“In a world where there are more than 200 million people watching game-related content daily on YouTube, Stadia makes many of those games playable with the press of a button”, Google says. While it is no physical console, Stadia has an official controller, WiFi-connected to the internet, with a button for game sharing (like that on PS4's joypad) and another one for Google Assistant.