Streaming services have become dime a dozen in the past few years. The most notable among these have been Sony"s foray into the market with PlayStation Now. The service offers gamers on the PlayStation 4, and PC the ability to stream PlayStation 2, and 3 - and more recently PlayStation 4 - titles through a subscription service. Companies like Jump gives those who love smaller indie titles a slew of options, and recently Nvidia announced its own entry into the market called Geforce Now, offering gamers the ability to play several Steam titles on a GTX 1080 hosted in the cloud.
These services generally work by streaming gameplay through the internet. Due to the nature of games, the streaming usually requires fast bandwidth - in some cases 25Mbps or higher - since it needs to push each frame and user input in a manner that keeps latency to a minimum. Microsoft, on the other hand, negated this by offering over one hundred digital games through a subscription service and adding backward compatibility for hundreds of Xbox 360 games. Xbox Game Pass allows gamers to directly download games and play them on capable hardware - be it Xbox One, or Windows 10 through the Play Anywhere program.
However, the need for dedicated hardware - in the case of Microsoft - can be a major barrier to entry. Thus, the continual push to create a service that allows any game to be played on all devices remains an elusive "game-changer".
According to a report by The Information (subscription required), it seems that Alphabet has taken on this challenge with a project called "Yeti". Although not much is known about the service, it allows a subscriber - or owner - of a game to play it on approved devices by way of streaming. It has also been suggested that the company could possibly enter the hotly contested console market with its own product that ties into the aforementioned service. This isn"t the first time the firm tried to enter this market, with the Nexus Player offering the ability to play Android-based games.
The project was reportedly delayed by Alphabet after it was initially scheduled to become available during the holiday season of 2017. It remains to be seen if this service will become available in the near future since the reason for this delay is unclear.
Source: The Information via Reuters
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