Recently, Google held an online Google for Games Keynote and quite a lot of new information came out of it including new games to come to Stadia. The majority of it was aimed at developers, although plenty of info for consumers came with the various presentations.
Firstly, what could be quite a big one, Splash Damage have announced they've teamed up with Google to make an exclusive Stadia game. Splash Damage worked on Gears of War, Halo, Dirty Bomb, Wolfenstein Enemy Territory and more. Probably safe to say it's going to be some sort of shooter.
We’re thrilled to finally announce that we’re working on an exclusive title in partnership with Google Stadia. At Splash Damage we’re always looking to innovate, and always looking for partners and platforms that allow us to do just that. We’ve been huge fans of Stadia ever since it was announced and have been amazed by both the technology and passion for gaming that the Stadia team has.
Splash Damage
They're obviously not giving out any other details just yet, although they did say more will be shared over the coming months and the way it sounded was that it's well into development. We will let you know more about the Splash Damage game when it's announced.
They reiterated that 120+ games will come to Stadia this year, and they showed off the below image mentioning that "the support from the game development community only continues to grow, we have hundreds of titles in active development from the best studios in the world - from teams with incredible history like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft":
Some pretty big names up there, I think we're going to see quite a lot of surprises come along to the Stadia game streaming service this year.
Also announced is Stadia Makers, a partnership with Unity for funding from Stadia including development hardware (and they're not asking for exclusivity, only a launch on Stadia at the same time) plus technical support and so on. This is open to developers using Unity 2019.3 or later and anyone can apply on Stadia.dev.
With Stadia being out for a while now for Founder/Premier Edition purchasers and Buddy Pass receivers, they've worked on improving the Stadia back-end. They've now integrated Backtrace for crash reports, Vivox for game voice communication and PlayFab.
It gets quite interesting when you listen to Bungie talking about porting to Stadia in the second video. They mention Vulkan, Linux, PulseAudio and more and it only took them about 6 months to port Destiny 2 over to Linux for Stadia with the bulk of the work being getting it working with Vulkan. However, that's a short time for such a massive game as they did have on-site help from Google.
Google also announced two free and open source services they've been working on for game developers:
- Open Match (Apache license) - "an open source game matchmaking framework that simplifies building a scalable and extensible Matchmaker". This is something Google co-founded with Unity.
- Agones (Apache license) - "a library for hosting, running and scaling dedicated game servers on Kubernetes". This was co-founded with Ubisoft.
In one of their older Stadia announcements, they showed off Crowd Play, which let people watch a video and then click a button to jump into that game at the point shown in the video. Google said that will be rolling out later this year. That's going to be a big pull for Stadia. Watching a game on YouTube from a favourite creator, then jumping in yourself. I don't think we should underestimate how much power that will have for the regular viewer.
Other special Stadia features will be coming soon, like allowing "content creators" to share special links to allow followers to click and get into a game on Stadia which includes a feature to have a link to a specific 30-second section. Google said that could be useful for games that have random seeds, to share exactly what the streamer has there and then. Plus special features for YouTube livestreamers running a Stadia game, like a live-poll to change what happens.
If you're interested in seeing all the Stadia videos, they're up on this YouTube playlist. That's just some of the highlights and stuff coming to Stadia across this year.
As always, we hope you find our Stadia round-ups interesting, helping you to keep up to date as the game streaming service expands. It currently works great on Linux, as we've shown a few times now. You can see our own Stadia Playlist on YouTube.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
and considering that a lot of youtubers and media in general are trash talking stadia, it will be an rough start.
the good news is: while everyone is trying to kill stadia, google is showing that he will not give up, contrary to what most people fear or expected, its even better that google is doubling down on their promisses while stadia is having trouble to prove then wrong.
as they say:
"when you are in the bottom of the wheel , the only path is upward"
if google can climb out of this hole, he will show to consumers that they have no reason to fear, "since it didnt gave up before when stadia was bad, now that its doing fine, there is nothing to fear"
the issue is: this will be enough to make developers support linux (i mean, offline on steam and etc) and to rise our marketshare?
i'm afraid not, pc enthusiasts arent likely to give up on all their tools for modding, 3D modeling etc so they can play it on linux, unless more tools get ported, the market shouldnt change much, and if console players didnt migrate before, i dont see why they would now.
not to mention that nvidia geforce now just did the pact with the devil, and microsoft playanywhere (including xcloud) seems better for many people.
Meanwhile, i've still some problems to run 4k stadia from my second pc.
But i suspect it's not a Linux issue.
It's working flawlessly from my main pc (ryzen 7 1700x and radeon rx 5700x), but un my second pc (ryzen 3 1200 + radeon rx 560) has seems like there are problems decoding the video stream in 4k, the game is laggy and unplayable.
works quite well on full hd.
Seems like the second PC isn't able to decode the video stream on the GPU, and the CPU isn't powerful enough.
I've tried with chroimium-vaapi on arch, but it seems it can decode using the GPU only on h264.
Same results on windows too, so as i said it's probably not a problem related to Linux.
The problem is, i can force h264 using Stadia+, but in that case i can use 1080p only.
i appreciate, that they have to make a linux version, but i dont want to pay twice for games
So far, so good.
hardpenguin Mar 24, 2020
i played destiny 2, war thunder, fortnite, apex, kingdom come and many more on geforcce nowBut War Thunder is already on Linux
i appreciate, that they have to make a linux version, but i dont want to pay twice for games
So in watching the "Bringing Destiny to Stadia" video, about 10 minutes in, I find it interesting how many people they put onto the Stadia port over 6 months.
Video claims that development environment for Stadia is using Windows. That's already fishy. If it's just an option and they can use Linux to develop (would be weird if they require to use Windows to develop for Linux), then it's not an issue.
Last edited by Shmerl on 25 March 2020 at 12:05 am UTC
I have to say, so far things are working out roughly as I hoped. That is, it isn't dying, but it shows no signs of taking over. I've always said I want it to succeed enough to make the idea of developing games to include a Linux target more mainstream, give Vulkan a boost and so on--but I don't want it to succeed enough to make streaming the dominant form of gaming, because I really hate that idea.
So far, so good.
the issue is, we didnt see what geforce now and xcloud will do...
maybe developers will give up on stadia and focus on those instead, since consumers arent likely to buy the games twice and they dont need to port to run on those services, and if consumers get used to play over streaming, we have the worse of both worlds...
not to mention that, capcom already removed their logo from the list of companies that support stadia...
So in watching the "Bringing Destiny to Stadia" video, about 10 minutes in, I find it interesting how many people they put onto the Stadia port over 6 months.
Video claims that development environment for Stadia is using Windows. That's already fishy. If it's just an option and they can use Linux to develop (would be weird if they require to use Windows to develop for Linux), then it's not an issue.
i hope its opitional, its very likely that their game engine or other middleware that they used only had an version for windows but could export for linux.
So in watching the "Bringing Destiny to Stadia" video, about 10 minutes in, I find it interesting how many people they put onto the Stadia port over 6 months. And 6 months, that's an insanely short amount of time. Bungie really had to invest in it, and honestly I don't think they would have ever remotely considered such a porting investment were it not for Stadia.
I also noted in the video (still watching) that there was mention of Unreal Engine having Vulkan support. Last I heard, that support wasn't the greatest on desktop. Maybe with a push on Stadia, then that might just give some incentive to change, which would definitely be beneficial to desktop GNU/Linux.
--extra: "Google has technical certification requirements", relating to frame rates. I suspected as much. You can't just slap any old game on Stadia; Google require the game to run well.
i didnt saw the number of employees, can you say it?
they showed an picture but i didnt count
that kind of resource allocation simply wouldn't have been done for desktop GNU/Linux..i dont see why not, if they limit then selves to an single distro (like: steamOS, ubuntu, chromeOS)
there is anything that i'm missing? like real time comunication/acess to the server?
Stadia being a single hardware and OS support target sure wouldn't have hurt matters eithersure it helps a lot, but they will expand the server hardware in the future, i just hope that they make an offline version in the future, if that thing helps the linux marketshare to grown...
in any case, i was asking because i have an idea of the numbers of people to develop an triple A game, but no idea on the porting side, i mean, yes, i saw the dying light port video, but it seems like an exception rather than the rule of how ports are done.
2/3 persons to port an game made by 200 (dying light)~1500 (gta 5, witcher3) people, seems abnormal, impossible, i think they put an low budget because linux didnt worth it for then, and valve didnt gave then enough confidence on SteamOS future, nor enough money, feral, or whatever they used (i cant remember) didnt had an big bugdget either.
i think in the case of xbox and playsytation, it is quite simmiliar to stadia, at least for the launch titles, there is a reason why google is hiring ex employees from thirdy parties like ubisoft (wich is their "gold partnership"), those companies already worked in the game production side, as well as in the logistic side, they know how microsoft and sony aproached ubisoft, so they know how google should aproach others.
also, google is hiring ex employees from sony and microsoft for the samre reason, to get know how of how to make business in that area.
how to make partnerships, how to direct an game, coding is just an small fraction of the process, sure its very important, but its not enough.
i played destiny 2, war thunder, fortnite, apex, kingdom come and many more on geforcce nowBut War Thunder is already on Linux
i appreciate, that they have to make a linux version, but i dont want to pay twice for games
but it is not on stadia, because they havent fixed vulkan since they released it........ 2 years ago
if you played with your steam account you can still use it with gfn. i dont think that it would be possible with stadia
that goes with all online games
pardon my attack but you start the playing the game and you say it has nice graphics but after playing for a few minutes doing the same thing all the time, just shooting at enemies with no brain stimulation its easy to see this is a game in the category "nice graphics, simple mechanics, repeating gameplay, enemies sitting targets, slow moving"
rant over.
No sales.that kind of resource allocation simply wouldn't have been done for desktop GNU/Linux..i dont see why not,
Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 25 March 2020 at 5:01 pm UTC
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