Report: Google is courting developers for the streaming service

Google could be the next big company to announce efforts to broadcast high-end games remotely servers. Kotaku quotes five anonymous people familiar with the company 's plans by reporting the existence of an effort to roll out a streaming gaming platform and hardware to enable it, as well as to make it work. an attempt to bring game developers under the umbrella of Google. significant acquisitions. "

The information reported similar murders of Google's streaming plans in February, indicating that a program with the code name Yeti had been in development for at least two years." But Kotaku adds that Google met with "several major video game companies" at the March Game Developers Conference and the June Electronic Entertainment Expo, seeking to make acquisitions and attract support for the next streaming platform. Kotaku's sources also suggest that Yeti could be integrated with Google's existing YouTube services, allowing users to search for videos without even leaving the game.

OnLive has failed to develop a successful business around games. streaming earlier in the decade.in the idea of ​​using high-end Internet connections to broadcast high-end games on cheap and low-end hardware. Sony has used its PlayStation Now service to provide streamed versions of many classic PlayStation games for years, and Nvidia's GeForce Now offers similar features for PC games.

Yves Guillemot, CEO of Ubisoft, is also optimistic that game streaming could replace consoles entirely after a generation of more hardware. And Microsoft made vague moves toward an Azure-based game streaming service at this year's E3 after saying five years ago that the idea of ​​streaming was "cool" but "problematic" .

Bandwidth to easily broadcast live HD video from a game from a server relatively well. But back-and-forth latency between button presses and screen responses remains a bigger problem for the cloud-based game concept – even a few tens of milliseconds of additional delay may be noticed for some games . The massive scale of Google and the existing data distribution infrastructure could certainly help in this regard, although much would depend on the individual ISPs of users and home network configurations. Predictive modeling technology such as Microsoft's DeLorean system could also help mitigate any apparent effect of Internet latency for continuous gaming.

Previous Google reports seeking to enter the video game space have resulted in no real action. buy Twitch before Amazon actually made the acquisition in 2014. But Google's hiring of the former director of the PlayStation and Xbox Phil Harrison earlier this year could indicate a more serious interest in the space this time.