HIGHLIGHTS

• Stadia’s price, availability, and game lineup will be unveiled on June 6
• The event will be live-streamed via Stadia’s official YouTube channel
• The streaming service is expected to be released in India in 2021

At the Game Developers Conference in March 2019, Google announced its game streaming service, Stadia. The streaming service is set to work across smartphones, tablets, TVs, laptops, and even PCs via Chrome and will leverage the Mountain View based tech giant’s data centres present in more than 200 countries across the globe. Late last month, Google announced it will reveal the pricing and launch titles of Google Stadia this ‘summer’. Now, Google has announced that it will hold a special ‘Stadia Connect’ event ahead of E3 2019 where-in the company will announce key details regarding the platform.

As we mentioned, Google late last month announced it would reveal pricing and availability this summer, and we can expect this announcement – scheduled for June 6 – to be about that. Google via an extremely brief video uploaded to Stadia’s official YouTube account confirmed that the ‘Stadia Connect’ presentation, will feature “launch info, game announcements, [and a] price reveal”. The event will be live-streamed via the same account at 9am PDT (9:30pm IST) on June 6. Stadia is currently stated to release in US, UK, Canada, and some parts of Europe in 2019, with an India launch expected in 2021. The reveal will happen before E3 2019, which kicks off on June 11.

At GDC 2019, Google announced its data centres have been infused with gaming-focused hardware to keep up with the task of streaming heavy games. Powering the centres is the AMD made 10.7 teraflop Stadia GPU. In comparison, the Xbox One X clocks in at 6 teraflops, and the PS4 Pro at 4.2 teraflops. Stadia will support cross-platform play and is set to ship with the Stadia controller – a traditional PlayStation-like controller with a dedicated Google Assistant button. That said, Google claims most mainstream gamepads should work fine as well.

Microsoft is also hard at work finalising its own gaming streaming service, xCloud, which was announced back in October 2018. More details regarding xCloud as well as its public trials are expected to be announced at Microsoft’s E3 event this Sunday. Back in March, Apple announced its gaming subscription service dubbed ‘Apple Arcade’, which is expected to launch this fall in over 150 countries. The service will feature more than 100 new games at launch and will work on iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple TVs. At the WWDC 2019 keynote on Monday, Apple also announced tvOS and iOS will get Microsoft Xbox One S and PlayStation DualShock 4 controller support

Source: gadgets.ndtv.com