For the initial test of Public Stream, Google made Assassin’s Creed Osyssey playable inside of a Chrome web browser:
Stepping back a bit, this makes a ton of sense, and it feels like all the pieces are moving into a place where the hardware you’re actually playing games on becomes totally irrelevant. It’s not like this suggestion is some far-fetched Sci-Fi future either, as OnLive was doing this, on the first generation iPad, nine years ago:
Lots of folks raised their eyebrows at , but perhaps they see the writing on the wall too. As internet connections get better, and as latency improves, there’s very few reasons remaining for you to actually do all the processing to run a game locally versus just playing it on some cloud platform.
Hell, I play a ton of games on my PC, and pretty much just budget to spend around $1,000 every couple years on a new video card. If that stops being a thing, and all the games I like are just streamable with latency comparable to being rendered locally? AND if that same stream works on everything I have from my PC to my TV to my phone? Man, that is an awesome future. I guess we’ll see what happens at GDC.