Several news agencies report receiving invitations from Google for an announcement to take place at the 2019 Game Developers Conference (GDC) next month. The details included in the invitation itself are scarce, apparently indicating that "everything will be revealed" during a speech delivered at the conference on March 19 at 10:00 am Paris time. This effective announcement of an upcoming announcement has revived speculation regarding Google's potential entry into the streaming games market.

GIF included in the invitation, via The Verge.

The general meditations surrounding the upcoming announcement are centered around the old "Yeti" rumors about a subscription service to the online game feed provided by Google with its own hardware, as well as project-based gameplay tests. Google's Chrome Stream that ended successfully last month.

In case you missed this latest development, Google has let people from some markets issue Assassin's Creed Odyssey via Chrome / Chrome OS. The testers even had the chance to get a free copy after playing at least an hour and the latency in the test markets was low enough to provide a nice gaming experience. As a stand-alone service or product, Google's Project Stream test and its apparent success involve it. could work, at least at a technical level.

Streaming games would be a slight departure from Google's previous subscription products. This is not a new concept, OnLive popularized the idea almost ten years ago, although it did not seem ready yet for consumers. More recently, Sony and Nvidia have launched streaming game streaming services, and Microsoft is also working on its side.

Google's main talk about the GDC is still over a month away, and although it may be something more innocuous than the ongoing gambling speculation that currently dominates the subject, there is a good chance that this be linked. We will have to wait and see to be sure, though.