Google Introduces Stadia

Google announced Stadia at the Game Developers Conference in March 2019 as a cloud gaming platform that would render games in data centers and stream the resulting video to players.

Cloud gaming moves the GPU away from the user’s home, but it cannot remove latency. A controller input must travel to the server, the game simulation and rendering must complete, the frame must be encoded, transmitted, decoded, and displayed before the next action feels responsive. Network jitter and packet loss matter as much as raw bandwidth.

Google built Stadia around custom AMD GPUs, Linux servers, and video-streaming infrastructure. The service launched later in 2019 but never attracted enough users; Google shut it down in 2023. The technical idea survived across competing cloud-gaming services.