Stadia, or Project Stream as it was earlier called, is a cloud gaming service where the games themselves are hosted on Google's servers, while the visual feedback from the game is streamed to the player's device through Google Chrome. If this technology catches on, and if it works just as good as showed in the demos, Stadia could be what the future of gaming might look like.
Stadia, Powered by Linux
It is a fairly common knowledge that Google data centers use Linux rather extensively. So it is not really surprising that Google would use Linux to power its cloud based Stadia gaming service.
Stadia's architecture is built on Google data center network which has extensive presence across the planet. With Google Stadia, Google is offering a virtual platform where processing resources can be scaled up to match your gaming needs without the end user ever spending a dime more on hardware.
And since Google data centers mostly runs on Linux, the games on Stadia will run on Linux too, through the Vulkan API. This is great news for gaming on Linux. Even if Stadia doesn't directly result in more games on Linux, it could potentially make gaming a platform agnostic cloud based service, like Netflix.
With Stadia, "the data center is your platform," claims Majd Bakar, head of engineering at Stadia. Stadia is not constrained by limitations of traditional console systems, he adds. Stadia is a "truly flexible, scalable, and modern platform" that takes into account the future requirements of the gaming ecosystem. When launched later this year, Stadia will be able to stream at 4K HDR and 60fps with surround sound.
Watch the full presentation here. Tell us what you think about Stadia in the comments.