There’s been a whole lot of chatter about gaming recently. Snap Inc, the company behind Snapchat is looking into launching its own gaming platform later this year, but they aren’t alone. According to a report from Kotaku, Google is also planning to get in on the games industry too – in a much bigger way. Google intends to implement a service like GeForce Now, which streams games to your computer at home from a server elsewhere. What’s more, it’s said to feature heavy YouTube integration.
We first heard rumors about the company’s desire to enter the gaming industry back in February this year, but we haven’t heard anything else since then. More information has risen, and Google intends to take the gaming industry by storm via a triple-pronged approach, the report suggests. First, they want to create a streaming platform and then they want to sell hardware that supports it. The company intends to entice game developers to come under the Google umbrella and develop for this platform (internally known as Yeti). They don’t care how they do it either – five separate employees of the company have been told that it will be done either via aggressive recruiting or straight up acquisitions of companies. Google tried to recruit game developers at E3 a few weeks ago and looked to buy up entire gaming studios.
This isn’t the first gaming-related venture by the company either, or attempt at one anyway. Google was the company that built up Niantic, the creators of Ingress and Pokemon Go, only giving it up when they became Alphabet Inc. The company then joined Nintendo and The Pokemon Company in investing up to $30 million into Niantic. They’ve been trying to get a foothold in the gaming market for a long time now, and that’s without even mentioning their failed attempt at buying Twitch.
But where does the YouTube integration come in? If you’re stuck, rather than taking out your phone to look up a guide, you could press a dedicated key which will then jump to the point of the game you’re in and show you a walkthrough for that portion of the game. The company already owns YouTube Gaming and has created partnerships with e-sports companies such as FaceIT, so it’s not too strange that they’d try to expand the platform even more.
Many developers are skeptical that the platform will actually take off, as we’re all aware of Google’s tendency to create projects and tear them down months later. Still, Google has been hiring a huge amount of people in the games industry in order to gain a foothold in the market. With how profitable the gaming industry is, it makes sense that they’d want in on that action.
What do you think? Would you use a Google-made GeForce Now-like cloud gaming platform?
Source: Kotaku
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