Cloud gaming like Stadia will need novel tech solutions

Two recent announcements signal games developers are realizing that, for cloud gaming, matching a player to their location and then placing game servers closer to them dramatically decreases lag and improves .experience. They are Google’s new cloud-based game service Stadia, and news that Pokemon Go developer Niantic has developed a mixed reality “multiplayer experience” that runs on an edge-cloud service.

But the two announcements work in very different ways. In particular the March announcement of Stadia, designed to run on just about any device (PCs, Android phones, Chromecast, and more) has left me wondering: is Google doing it all wrong?