Google Said to Expand Video Game Interests, Develop 'Yeti' Game Streaming Platform

Following on from the first news back in February, a new report has further detailed Google's plans to get into video games, one that involves a game streaming service and hardware.

According to five people who have spoken to Kotaku, Google is pushing in three directions: a game streaming service (codenamed Yeti) akin to Nvidia's GeForce Now, hardware that will facilitate the streaming platform, and courting game developers.

Kotaku's source say that Google met "several big video game companies" at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco in March and at E3 2018 in Los Angeles earlier in June. Google reportedly talked about its streaming platform to "gauge interest" and is interested in both wooing developers and buying studios outright.

A game streaming service would allow Google to leverage its cloud power, which powers YouTube, Gmail, and the rest of the suite. It would also help bring its game offerings to any platform out there, regardless of its specifications. Of course, game streaming does require heavy bandwidth usage and low latency, which are still big hurdles in most parts of the world, including India.

There isn't any information on the hardware side of things, says Kotaku, except that "it will link up with the streaming service in some way".

This isn't the first time Google has tried to push into video gaming. It tried acquiring Twitch in 2014, but Amazon won that particular round. Back in January, Google hired Phil Harrison, an industry veteran who held key positions at Sony and Microsoft before joining Google.

Game streaming is seen as the future, since it will get rid of expensive hardware requisites. Ubisoft chief Yves Guillemot said as much at the start of June. And at E3 2018, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said Microsoft is working to engineer "console-quality game streaming on any device".

Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash

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