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EA’s running community playtests for its own cloud streaming service

EA is trying its hand at cloud gaming, and you can sign up to test it

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Last year, Electronic Arts announced Project Atlas – an effort to build tech appropriate for the impending wave of cloud gaming services. Things have been pretty quiet around Atlas since, but today, the company has revealed more details and opened sign-ups for community playtesting of cloud-based game streaming.

To be clear, Project Atlas is the name of EA’s overall cloud gaming R&D effort, and actual game streaming is “just one very specific part of that vision.” The Medium post from EA’s chief technology officer, Ken Moss, breaks down the broad philosophy behind this development, but in concrete terms, here’s what you need to know.

You can sign up to test EA’s cloud gaming technical trial through the company’s community playtesting portal. The trial will give you access to FIFA 19, Titanfall 2, Need for Speed Rivals, and Unravel. Cross-play is a focus, so the trial will “engage with the live PC environment on Origin,” and your progress in those games will carry over into the Origin versions when the trial is complete.

EA says this test is intended in part to see how cloud gaming can adjust to “unstable bandwidth and network strength” – which still mark some of the biggest concerns around our apparent cloud gaming future. The test will also help see how the cloud tech performs across a variety of gaming genres.

The Google Stadia release date is set for November, and while it’s far from the first effort to make cloud gaming a thing, it is by far the biggest push we’ve seen yet. We’ll see how it turns out in the space of a couple of months, but you can follow that link for details on everything we know so far.