In 2010, a company called OnLive believed that game streaming was the future. The problem was that they believed that this future would come sooner than what ended up happening. The company (or rather, its IP) would end up being bought by Sony instead. The Japanese company then launched PlayStation Now later, which in itself is a cloud gaming platform that finally brought us closer to that future.

They weren't the only ones hedging this bet, however, and soon the cloud gaming fever spread to other companies and manufacturers. NVIDIA's GeForce NOW is one of the clearest examples of that venture, with its own pros and cons. But now we have a new, promising competitor in this field: Google, which announced yesterday the birth of the so-called "Project Stream". As the name suggests, this initiative is intended to offer end users the possibility of playing any game from any device and with only one requirement: to have access to the Google Chrome browser.The initial launch has been specially striking thanks to Google's alliance with Ubisoft. This collaboration has resulted in a demonstration in which users can enjoy Assassin's Creed: Odyssey directly through their Chrome browser and without the need for a powerful PC or a console and all the hardware resources that these machines provide.

It seems obvious that Google streaming goes beyond than YouTube in terms of user interactivity. In its blog post announcing Project Stream, Google's managers explained how "the idea of streaming such graphically-rich content that requires near-instant interaction between the game controller and the graphics on the screen poses a number of challenges" and pointed out that "when streaming TV or movies, consumers are comfortable with a few seconds of buffering at the start, but streaming high-quality games requires latency measured in milliseconds, with no graphic degradation".


This is, of course, one of the great obstacles that companies banking on cloud gaming will have to overcome. In the demo video above, you can see how Ubisoft's game runs without apparent problems at 1080p and 60 fps, and Google indicates that you can expect that performance for users with a home internet connection of at least 25 megabits per second. We do not yet know how the responsiveness is going to vary from region to region as this point, of course. To get a chance to participate in this initial test phase, Google requires that you are 17 years or older and live in the US, have an internet connection speed of at least 25 Mbps down, a controller or keyboard and mouse, along with accounts for Google, Chrome and Ubisoft. If this is valid and you want to apply, you can do so on the sign-up page here.

This announcement makes even more sense combined with the rumors that appeared months ago talking about Project Yeti that point to a future Google-branded gaming console. This console could therefore be the other element of a strategy that would combine a modest hardware device with the utilization of this GaaS (Gaming-as-a-Service) platform. Demonstrating the technology with an AAA game like this one seems to suggest that the future that people once dreamed of with OnLive might not be too far away.