Google’s Stadia cloud gaming platform is so powerful that it can stream multiple interactive streams for players who are playing high-quality 4K video games like the upcoming Doom Eternal. And one of the things this enables is split-screen gaming.
Long a staple of early video games, split-screen games have almost disappeared because of the challenge of streaming multiple scenes at the same time to a single TV and a single internet connection.
But with Google Stream Connect, players will be able to play on the same TV with multiple windows, or even play in squads in multiplayer games, said Google’s Erin Hoffman-John in an announcement today at the Game Developers Conference 2019 in San Francisco, where it showed off its Stadia cloud gaming controller and platform.
The ability to enable split-screen gaming shows the power of the Google cloud, which is available in more than 200 countries around the world. Not only will Google enable players to play streamed games at 4K resolution at 60 frames per second, it will also enable them to stream video of their play to YouTube at 4K resolution and 60 frames per second.
Google signaled its intentions when it hired Phil Harrison, former head of Sony’s worldwide studios and a former Microsoft Xbox executive, last year. The clues got even bigger as Google assembled a team of game veterans, including the hiring last week of former EA and former Ubisoft executive Jade Raymond. Other game veterans at Google include former Sony exec Jack Buser and former Xbox Live Arcade leader Greg Canessa.