Google’s game division has been beavering away in secret for quite a while now and whatever it is it’s going to be revealed next week at GDC. “Gather around as we unveil Google’s vision for the future of gaming at #GDC19” they tweeted, and also released a short video.
I suspect that wording is deliberate, gather round would indicate some sort of social or online type of gameplay. We’re not sure what they are revealing, possibly a new streaming platform as designs for a controller were found a few days ago.
They’ve also been snapping up a lot of talent, that latest being Assassin’s Creed legend Jade Redmond.
I’m excited to finally be able to share that I have joined Google as VP!
— Jade Raymond (@ibjade) March 12, 2019
It will be interesting to see how in the industry reacts to the announcement, obviously Google are a huge company with a lot of money but they’ve had failures in the past with the Facebook rival Google + closing it’s doors recently. Also, just being huge doesn’t mean success, Amazon’s game efforts have been less than spectacular and any attempt to pull players away from the big four – Xbox, PlayStation, PC, and Nintendo – have failed, even Valve’s customers shunned Steam Machines.
tonyyeb
As a person heavily tied to the Google ecosystem (Android, GMail, G Suite, Google Classroom, Chrome OS etc), I’m very interested to see what they are planning.
Andrewww
As a person trying to avoid evil Google the best I can, I hope they fail miserably here too. In the end they very likely only see games as another platform to a) collect as much user data as possible, with or without consent of those being logged, and b) shove as much ads down everyone’s throat to make money.