Google's white label version of Stadia is Immersive Stream for Games
James Batchelor
Editor-in-Chief
Monday 21st March 2022
At a glance:
The new arm of Google Stadia, which enables developers and publishers to use the streaming technology in their own products and services, has a name: Immersive Stream for Games.
The brand was announced during last week's Google for Games Developer Summit, and has been created as the result of a partnership between the established Stadia team and the Google Cloud division.
Immersive Stream for Games has already secured one customer: AT&T, which used the tech to launch a cloud version of Batman: Arkham Knight in October 2021 as an exclusive incentive for AT&T Wireless customers.
Google also announced a number of updates for the consumer-facing version of Stadia during the summit, including work on making the service's storefront accessible to all users, even without a Stadia account.
This will launch "in the coming weeks" and will make it easier for non-Stadia users to search through the 200+ games on offer. Links to this storefront are also expected to show up in Google Search results for these titles.
For developers, Google unveiled its work on 'Low Change Porting', an initiative to accelerate how quickly games can be adapted to Stadia. This process involves the launch of libraries that auto-translate DirectX, and improved support for the widely-used Unity and Unreal game engines.
Paradox Interactive, Team 17 and Five Nights At Freddy's developer Steel Wool Studios are among the first companies to use Low Change Porting on its games.
Finally, Google announced Click To Play Trials, which allow developers and publishers to offer consumers the chance to play their full games without the need for a Stadia account, and with no need to install anything.
