Google doesn’t want it’s Stadia release date reveal to get lost in the E3 maelstrom next week and so the full, official info-dump is coming much sooner. So soon, in fact, that you can watch the whole of the Google Stadia Connect livestream right here in just a few hours. The event is kicking off today at 9am PDT, 12pm EDT, or 5pm BST, and the video is just a short scrollwheel stroke away down this very page…
Google announced the Stadia Connect event a couple of days ago, promising to show off “more Stadia news, including pricing, games, and launch details.” The internet giant has already promised that the game streaming service will be available across the US, UK, Canada, and “most of” Europe later on this year, so we’re not far away from its release date now.
To be honest, the actual release date is one of the less interesting details we’re hoping to hear from Google later on today. For us, the most fascinating part of the setup is just how the business model is going to work; how much it costs, and how any proposed subscription system could cater to both the stream and the dedicated Stadia games.
Will you have to buy games separately, will there be some kind of rolling game access model, a la the recently announced Xbox Game Pass for PC, or will you just pay a fortune for the Stadia Controller and that will be your entry point for the service? All of that is still on the table right now, but we’ll find out for sure how Google wants to play it later on today.
The other interesting part of the whole Stadia game streaming thing is how the hardware works, but we’re unlikely to hear too much more on the technical side right now. Personally I’m fascinated about how it’s going to use multiple AMD Polaris-based GPUs and stitch them together to create seamless multi-GPU instances.
CrossFire it ain’t, but AMD has long talked about the challenges of using multiple graphics chips working together on a single gaming project, so it will be interesting to see how team red has managed to do so with Google Stadia.
Join the conversation and comment on Google Stadia on this article’s Facebook and Twitter posts.