Google Stadia’s Phil Harrison: Cloud-based gaming will be a difficult but ‘fundamental shift’

With Stadia, Google is trying to change the way people play games. And if the upcoming cloud gaming service takes off, the company hopes it’ll fundamentally change how developers make their games, too.

Google vice president Phil Harrison (who’s overseeing Stadia) and veteran game designer Amy Hennig spoke about the future of gaming at the first day of the 2019 GamesBeat Summit. One topic they touched on was how cloud-based technology can benefit both players and game designers. By offloading processing to Google’s data centers, developers won’t have to worry about targeting a limited range of technical specifications (as they would on console, PC, or mobile).