The big news out of GDC today is Stadia, the cloud gaming service that Google says will launch later this year with support for 4K resolution at 60 fps. The biggest (and, I think, only) game announced for the platform at this point is Doom Eternal, but Google has also joined with Unreal and Unity to "bring full support to the most popular and familiar game engines to our development community."
In fact, developers can take advantage of one half of that partnership right now, as Epic has announced that Unreal Engine support for Stadia is already available. The engine will enable developers to dive into Stadia's new features "through familiar interfaces," and to iterate locally before deploying to the cloud. And because Stadia is entirely cloud-based, playtesting is simply a matter of sharing a link.
"We’ve been building our support for Stadia to ensure that developers using Unreal Engine can hit the ground running and be successful on the platform," Epic senior platform engineer Arciel Rekman said. "Today we’re releasing a fully-featured integration with Stadia to help developers bring their games to an even broader spectrum of players."
I'm not convinced that Stadia will live up to all the hype, at least out of the gate, but it's interesting to see Epic moving so aggressively to be at the front of its development. Developers who want to try their hand at Stadia can apply at stadia.dev. Once you're signed up, access to Stadia's Unreal SDK can be at at unrealengine.com.
For more in-depth thoughts on Google's big move, be sure to catch our conversation on what Stadia could mean for PC gaming.
