Stadia GDC 2019 Gaming Announcement

[Applause] [Applause].

Speaker: Please welcome to the stage, theCEO of Google, Sundar Pichai! Sundar Puchai: Good morning, everyone.

It's great to be here.

Thank you all for joining us.

I suppose I should start out with a confession.

I'm actually not a big gamer, though I doplay FIFA�19 quite a bit, and really enjoy how immersive it is.

I also play ashes cricket quite a bit, andfor those of you who are wondering what cricket is, it's kind of like baseball, but better.

[Laughter]Another littleknown fact is that Google makes arguably the mostplayed game on the internettoday, it's the DINO chrome game, mostly played when there's no internet connection.

Not going to talk to you about the high qualitygraphics and sophistication you all are used to, but it does have a lot of players, andprobably a lot more hours than I care to admit.

While I'm not a big gamer, I do have the privilegeof working at a company and leading a company full of people who love to solve hard computerscience problems.

For many Googlers, their journey with computersstarted with games.

Games have inspired many generations of peopleto pursue carrier SYNTAX and through that process this they build resourcefulness, creativityand collaboration, all qualities that are key to solving hard problems, and within Googleand alphabet, games play a big part in developing our own technology.

The best example I can think of is how weare making progress on AI.

Deep minds uses self play to learn from scratchand master games like chess, Shoji and DO.

It's an important step to creating a flexible, generalpurpose system that can learn to solve many foundational problems.

More recently, alpha star became the firstAI to defeat a top professional player at star craft 2, using a deep neural networktrained directly from raw game data.

Increasingly, games are helping AIs learnto tackle real world challenges.

Even beyond deep mind, another great examplewe have is VAMO, where we use simulations in gaming to test things that aren't actuallypossible or safe at scale in the real world.

In fact, it's driven more than five billionhours in simulations that vehicles won't normally encounter, and we use it, we learn from itand actually improve the systems that we'll be replaying in the real world.

Perhaps the biggest impact of gaming is howit pushes us to make big leaps in computing a networking power high affinity graphicsand the infrastructure that supports it all.

All of you are pushing computing and technologyforward, and I find that really exciting.

At Google, we have always believed that technologyshould adapt to people, not the other way around.

We've been building for some time.

For example, when we launched chrome a decadeago, we imagined, we envisioned that it could be a modern platform for Web applications, and bring the power of Web to everyone, including use cases that seemed impossible at that time, like highquality games.

Finally, we are making progress towards thatgoal.

In fact, over the past two years, we've beenhard at work on game streaming technology.

And last fall, we launched our first publictest with project stream.

As some of you guessed, a technical test wasn'tthe whole view of our ambition.

It was probably the worstkept secret in theindustry.

Internally, we were actually testing our abilityto stream high fidelity graphics over a low agency network.

We learned that we could bring a AAA gameto any device at the chrome browser and an internet connection, using the best of Googleto create a powerful game platform.

And when we say best of Google, it alwaysstarts with the cloud and networking infrastructure.

Our custom server hardware and data centerscan bring more computing power to more people on planet earth than anyone else.

Today, we are in 19 regions, and in over 200countries and territories connected by hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber optic cables.

The best of Google also includes our openplatforms that allow us to reach billions of people.

With Google, your games will be immediatelydiscoverable by over two billion people on a chrome browser, chrome books, chromecast, pixel devices, and we have plans to support more browsers and platforms over time.

That's in addition to all the people playingand watching games across YouTube and Google play.

And when we build these ecosystems, we alwaystake the approach that we only succeed when our partners do.

Collectively, our partners across Web, Googleplay and YouTube have earned more than $110 billion over the past four years alone, andwe are committed to this approach here as well.

So now we have focused on our next big effort, which is to build a game platform for everyone.

And when we say for everyone, we really meanit.

It's one of our most cherished values as acompany, be it Android or chrome or AI, we are dead serious about making technology accessiblefor everyone.

But if you think about games, there are alot of barriers for users to play highend games.

Beautiful graphics really need highend consolesor PCs, and games don't have instant access.

Think about the way the Web works.

You can easily share a link and it works seamlessly.

We want games to feel that way, too.

Instantly enjoyable with access for everyone.

I think we can change the game by bringingtogether the power and creativity of the entire community, people who love to play games, people who love to watch games, and people who love to build games.

That means all of you.

We are really excited to work with you.

We want to build a platform.

We want you to show us what's possible.

And together, I think we can create a newgames experience powered by best of Google and built for everyone.

Let's take a look.

Speaker: From the beginning of time, gameshave brought us together.

Players and spectators.

By the handful, the hundreds and the thousands.

We built stadiums, places to gather aroundevery kind of spectacle.

Glory.

Tragedy.

Pageantry.

Community, rivalry.

And wonder.

Until every city, town and village had a placewhere anyone could play.

Thousands of years later, our games have changed, but our need to come together remains.

This new era of gaming needs a new place togather.

One place, where anything you dream can bebuilt.

Playgrounds for every imagination.

One place where you and everyone you knowand everyone they know will all play together.

Speaker: Let's go! Let's go! Let's go! Speaker: Let's go, squad! Speaker: Let's go! Speaker: One place that never stops evolving, Where everyone will play.

Where did he come from? Speaker: And watch.

Speaker: Yes! High five! Speaker: And create.

From any screen.

At any time.

One place for all the ways we play.

This is Stadia.

Gather round.

[Applause]Sundar: Welcome to Stadia.

We are so excited by this.

To do this well, it's important that we havethe right people working on this, experts with deep history and heritage in games.

That starts with Phil Harrison, who joinedus about a year ago.

He's a great leader and a great gamer, definitelysomeone who knows the difference between RPGs and NPCs.

We're going to pass the mic over to Phil toshow you what we've built.

Take it over, Phil.

Phil Harrison: Thank you, Sundar.

[Applause]Phil Harrison: Thank you, Sundar.

It's such a pleasure to be here today andthank you for joining us at GDC as we finally get to share Google's vision for the futureof games, where the worlds of watching and playing games converge into a new generationgame platform, purpose built for the 21st century, powered by the best of Google.

Our vision for Stadia is simple.

One place for all the ways we play.

It's focused on gamers, inspired by developers, and amplified by YouTube creators.

Today, our industry captivates over two billionplayers from all around the world.

At the center of that community, its beatingheart, are the game developers, the people in this room that create the most incrediblegame experiences that delight players with engrossing stories, characters and worldsthrough a dazzling display of technology, artistry and magic.

Games are now the single biggest form of entertainmenton the planet, one that connects a vast community across geographies, cultures and language, and within that passionate community, there is a universe of people who love playing games, and there is a universe of people who love watching games, hundreds of millions of peoplewatch gaming content every single day on YouTube.

But those two worlds are mostly disconnected, fragmented and often independent of each other.

Our vision is to bring those worlds closertogether, to connect game developers with players and YouTube creators in a way thatonly Google can, creating a richer and more vibrant gaming community for everyone to enjoy.

Through the power of our data centers, theextraordinary reach and community of YouTube and our investments in the fundamental technologiesthat are the foundations of the open internet, we offer a truly unique opportunity to combinethese worlds.

We will be handing that extraordinary powerof the data center over to you, the game developers, where playgrounds for every imagination canbe created.

Our first public test of this came in Octoberof last year with project stream, where we streamed a AAA HD game at up to 1080 P and60 frames per second over the internet from Google data centers to a chrome browser.

We were humbled by the overwhelmingly positiveresponse from players who were able to join us on project stream.

A huge thank you to those of you who participatedin project stream and for your vital feedback, and also to the amazing people at Ubisoftfor trusting us with the latest incarnation of their incredible game franchise, assassin'screed.

Ubisoft has always been at the forefront ofadvancements in the games industry, and they have an incredible track record of successand creativity.

And joining us here in the audience today, I'm delighted to welcome the CEO and cofounder of Ubisoft, Yves Guillemot.

Thank you, Yves.

[Applause]I'd like to thank Yves and his team for partnering with us and to producer Marc Alexi Cote andthe entire Ubisoft Quebec studio for their masterpiece creation, assassin's creed odyssey.

Thank you for bringing your game to our platformand congratulations for being the first game played by the public on Stadia.

As many of you experienced with assassin'screed odyssey, we now have the ability to take a sophisticated graphically intense AAAgame and stream it to a chrome browser running on a simple laptop without any sacrifice tothe quality or vision of the game developer.

As successful as project stream was, our ambitionis, of course, far beyond a single game.

As we developed our strategy for this newplatform, we asked developers how we can help solve some of the most critical challengesyou face.

There were three very clear themes that resonated.

You told us you wanted to unleash your creativitywithout limits, get to the widest possible scale, and make it easier for people to connectwith your games.

We used these three themes to anchor our visionand build our platform architecture, and began to share it with the leading publishers anddevelopers in the world.

Now, let me show you how we have brought thisvision to life.

Imagine you are watching games on YouTubeand you discover the latest assassin's creed odyssey trailer on Ubisoft's official channelon YouTube.

You will notice the play now button.

By simply clicking on that button, the playeris brought directly into the game in a browser in as quick as five seconds.

With no download [Applause]With no download, no patch, no update and no install.

Stadia offers instant access to play.

Our platform vision for Stadia is to reducethe friction between getting excited about a game and playing a game.

On Stadia, you just need to click on a YouTubevideo or link and you can be playing your game instantly.

Compare that to today, where gamers are alltoo familiar with things like this.

With Stadia, this waiting game will be a thingof the past.

The power of instant access is magical, andhas already transformed the music and movie industries, and with Stadia it is now availableat the highest level of gaming.

But wouldn't it be even more magical if thatsame game and that same instant experience could be available across any screen typein your life.

A key benefit of our platform is that a singlecreative vision and a single code base can now be enjoy instantly across any screen.

At launch, we'll support being able to playgames across desktops, laptops, TV, tablets and phones.

This new generation of gaming is not a box.

With Stadia, the data center is your platform.

There is no console that limits the developer'screative ideas, and no console that limits where gamers can play, and we're about toshow this to you now.

This is not a concept.

It's not a test.

This is really.

I'd like to bring my friend Khaled to thestage to show you this working.

[Applause]So imagine you've just discovered that game for the first time.

You're running it on the chrome browser, andhere it is on a pixel book running the chrome OS.

There is basically no hardware accelerationon that laptop whatsoever and the game is running directly from our data center.

It's then easy and instantaneous to move thatsame game experience from exactly that moment on to the phone here on a pixel 3 XL.

[Cheers and Applause]Once again, no loss in quality and we can go straight on to the desk top PC.

We actually went to buy the least powerfulPC we could find here and we could enjoy the same vision that the developer had, the samehigh quality 1080P stream at 60 frames per second and the full game vision, regardlessof the hardware that you're using.

And then it's once again seamless to go fromrunning on our PC to running on a tablet.

In this case, once again, running the chromeOS on a pixel slate.

[Cheers and Applause]and then finally, wethen move seamlessly to the TV.

And so this TV is accessed using this, whichis a chromecast ultra HDMI streamer.

There is no console required to reach thisexperience.

[Cheers and Applause]thanks, Khaled.

Great presentation.

[Cheers and Applause]welcoming any and allplayers is fundamental to Stadia, where you can try with your friends on devices you alreadyown.

And as such, we are also enabling playersto use your existing USB controller or mouse and keyboard when playing Stadia on a laptopor PC.

By eliminating that friction, that barrierto entry, we will make it simple and easy for players who want to try Stadia for thefirst time.

But, of course, we will have our own controllerthat is being uniquely designed to enhance the experience for the Stadia player.

I'd like to introduce you to the newest memberof the Google hardware family, the Stadia controller.

[Cheers and Applause]this is your gatewayto the best of Stadia.

It enables you to access the full Stadia experience, and there are many advantages to the Stadia controller, and the first is that it willconnect, through wifi, directly to the game that is running in the Google data center.

The Stadia controller identifies which screenor device you want to play on and links it with your game session running in the cloud, ensuring the highest possible performance and the best experience for players.

In addition to the standard functions you'dexpect to see on a modern game controller, the Stadia controller features two very importantnew buttons.

The capture button is for sharing and savingyour game experience back out to YouTube.

The gamer can choose to share their experiencesstarting with a click of this button, to themselves, to their friends, or to the world.

They are in control.

And the second one is the Google assistantbutton.

Pressing this button allows players to immediatelyaccess the controller's builtin microphone so they can get help from the assistant forspecial ingame features integrated by developers.

Our goal with Stadia is to help fuel developercreativity at every level.

And next, we'll take a look at the incrediblecomputing power we have custom build into our data centers that will further accelerateinnovation.

I'd like to introduce my friend and colleague, the head of engineering for Stadia, Majd bakar.

Majd Bakar: Thanks so much, Phil.

Let's look at the realtime computing powerwe have put into our data centers that will change how we view what a game platform canbe.

In order to deliver an amazing experiencefor your games, we needed to bring powerful computing closer to users.

We've built Stadia's architecture on top ofthe Google data center network, the same network that has been delivering search results toyour fingertips in milliseconds for more than 20 years.

The network consists of fiber optic linksand subsea cables between hundreds of points of presence and more than 7, 500 edge nodelocations around the globe, all connected with our network backbone.

Stadia is built on infrastructure that noone else has.

More edge nodes mean the compute resourcesare closer to players, which results in better performance.

We took that proven model and infused it withcustomdesigned, purposebuilt gaming hardware, creating the most powerful and connected gamingplatform.

Each of Stadia's data center is composed ofinterconnected racks that deliver the highpowered, graphics, memory and storage needed to runthe most demanding games.

Only with Google can you apply the power andflexibility of data centers to game development.

This architecture is the foundation for thisnew generation of gaming.

We've been testing this technology privatelywithin Google for years, for our initial public test with project stream in 2018, we deliveredup to 1080P, 60 frames per second with stereo audio.

When Stadia launches, we will have increasedperformance significantly to support resolutions up to 4k at 60 frames per second.

[Cheers and Applause]with HDR and surroundsound.

And in the future, we'll be able to streamgames in up to 8k resolution.

[Applause]We know there are not that many homes or TVs in the world that have 8k today, but we alsoknow the widespread adoption of 8k is inevitable.

We have built our platform to scale up withthe highestperforming networks to deliver the visual quality demanded by future generationof gamers and game developers.

What's even more exciting is that in additionto the stream you get as a player, there is a second simultaneous stream at 4k, 60 framesper second that you can choose to share directly to YouTube from the Stadia data center, meaningyour gaming memories will be saved at the highest possible quality.

Stadia is not constrained by the limitationof traditional console systems.

Instead, we have built a truly flexible, scalableand modern platform that allows us to push performance beyond what was previously consideredpossible.

This architecture gives us even more flexibilityto scale.

And thanks to fast transfer speeds betweenthe Stadia instances in our data center, our platform can connect instances together todynamically expand the capabilities, along with the need of your games.

As a developer, you're used to being forcedto tone down your creative ambition that are limited by the hardware.

But our vision with Stadia is that the processingresources available will scale up to match your imagination.

In this new generation, the data center isyour platform.

We've partnered with our friends at AMD tobuild a custom GPU.

I'd like to personally thank Dr.

�Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO, who is here with us today.

Lisa and her team helped us design a chipto bring you more than 10 teraflops of power, which we've coupled with a custom intel�CPUto make up a single Stadia instance.

And here's how the graphical power of Stadiacompares to the top two consoles in the market.

You can see [Applause]Thank you.

You can see that a single Stadia instanceis a big step forward.

10.

7 teraflops is more powerful than the toptwo consoles of the previous generation combined.

[Applause] Stadia will be using the Linuxoperating system and the open graphics API, Vulkan.

And when it comes to game engines, we're excitedto announce that we have partnered with unreal, who will be fully supporting the Stadia platform.

We are also partnering with unity to bringfull support for the two most popular and familiar game engines to our development community.

And we're empowering developers with an amazingarray of familiar middleware that you already use to power your game development, includingthe most popular physics engine, Havok.

And here is a list of our partners now.

And of course, this list will continue togrow over time.

With this suite of tools, game developmentcan evolve as quickly as the imagination of content creators.

To achieve that, we are providing multipleways to make games for Stadia.

You can develop on our cloud, your cloud, and at your desk.

Our goal is to make Stadia the most flexibledevelopment environment ever put together, and that power is, of course, used to createthe best content.

Our first guest is from a company known forcreating the most sophisticated and impressive gaming experiences in the industry that alwaysdemand the most of every system they run on.

We had the chance to give our friends at IDearly access to our tools and technology.

It's my absolute pleasure to welcome to thestage executive producer from ID, Marty Stratton.

[Applause]Marty Stratton: Hi, everyone.

Thanks so much for having us here, Phil andMajd.

I'm honored to be part of a team at ID thathas spent more than 25 years on the bleeding edge of technical innovation.

When we first met with Google about game streaming, frankly we were skeptical, about how it would work, and in particular, how it could workwith a game like doom.

However, we recognized not just your abilityand resources to make game streaming a reality, but more importantly, the passion to supporta game as fast, fluid and uncompromising as doom.

After all, if you're going to prove to theworld that you can stream games from the cloud, what better proof than doom? And, if you're going to prove to a developerthat you're serious about building a robust platform, what better team than ID, wherewe push every platform to its limit.

In fact, back in 2016, doom was the firstAAA game released on Vulkan.

And because Stadia is built on that same VulkanAPI, it didn't take us more than a few weeks to get our upcoming sequel, doom eternal, looking and playing great on Stadia.

Built on the fun and sense of power playersexpect from the series, doom eternal is a pure and unfiltered action FPS experience.

You play as an unstoppable hero sent to destroyhell's fiercest demons across an expanding universe of unbelievable locations.

We couldn't be happier to be bringing doometernal to Stadia and are thrilled to announce that the game will be capable of running attrue 4k resolution with HDR color at an unrelenting 60 frames per second.

[Cheers and Applause]we actually can't waitto show you more of doom eternal very soon, in fact.

We have the full game running on Stadia livefrom Google data centers, and you can see it today at our developer session.

It starts at 12:30 over in west hall.

You won't want to miss it.

Thank you to Google and Stadia team for givingus this opportunity to share a bit about doom eternal.

Thanks so much.

[Applause]Phil Harrison: Thanks so much, Marty.

It's a privilege to work with ID and yourincredible engineers and creators.

For anyone who knows the franchise, you knowdoom eternal will look and play amazingly well on our platform.

It was important for us to partner with adeveloper like ID so that we could prove not just to ourselves, but to the entire industry, that our platform is capable of supporting the most demanding titles.

And doom will be running on a single StadiaGPU.

The fundamental benefit of our cloud nativeinfrastructure is that developers will be able to take advantage of hardware and powerin ways never before possible, and that includes taking advantage of the power of multipleGPUs at once.

We've asked our friends at UL benchmarks, makers of 3D mark, to put Stadia to the test.

In this video you can see some comparisonpoints showing the difference between our single GPU and multiple GPUs.

What you see here on the left of the lineis running on a single 10.

7 teraflop GPU.

And on the right of the line, you can seethe same content running on Stadia using multiple GPUs.

In this demo, we're highlighting realtimefluid defamation.

Accurate water simulation is one of the mostcomputed effects of the games and it's a powerful example of what Stadia is capable of and I'mso excited to see where game developers go with this kind of performance.

When we designed Stadia, our goal was to solvemany of the pain points that we've heard about from developers, particularly those relatedto multiplayer.

In traditional platforms, the client and serverare connected by the unpredictable internet, and therefore the multiplayer experience islimited by the client with the slowest or poorest quality connection.

But with Stadia, that game, client and serverboth remain on Google's networking backbone, resulting in predictable low latency, reliableconnectivity and data security since no traffic gets exposed to the public internet.

Developers who use Google's data centers cancreate a predictable multiplayer experience that scales to an order of magnitude greaterthan anything enjoyed by gamers today.

What that means is a synchronized state acrossa very high volume of players, where innovations like distributed physics can be built intoyour games, where battle royale games could go from hundreds of players today to thousandsof players tomorrow.

And, yes, no cheating and no hacking.

Google has always believed that the worldis a better place when we are able to connect without barriers.

And as a new generation game platform, Stadiawill, of course, embrace full crossplatform play.

[Applause]Developers will have the ability to enable crossplatform multiplayer for all players, and even bring game saves and progression across as well.

I'd now like to introduce a member of Stadia'sR�&�D team who are pushing the envelope, bringing the best of Google to game developers.

Please welcome to the stage our lead designerfor research and development at Stadia, Erin HoffmanJohn.

[Applause]Erin HoffmanJohn: Thank you, Phil.

One of our team's favorite comments aboutproject stream was a tweet that described Stadia's technology as the work of wizards, and we are incredibly fortunate to work with wizards every day bending their magic towardgames.

I'd like to take you through a few technologiesand features that we've been working on that are going to enhance the game developmentprocess for developers big and small.

The first one is focused on multiplayer.

Stadia not only provides highperforming multiplayerexperiences from player to player, but also allows developers to create new, gorgeousgaming environments.

Our friends at tangent games have been workingwith us on a technical proof of concept that you can see here behind me.

They spent a few short weeks creating thisbeautiful multiplayer world with a persistent massively destructible environment.

It is a raw demonstration of scale and powerusing the best of Stadia technology where every piece of the environment in this multiplayerworld is destructible using realtime rigid body physics.

Using Google's unique infrastructure, developerscan create games built to house hundreds of players with low latency and perfect synchronization.

This demo will be available on the show floorif you want to check it out this week.

As we were building the platform, we collaboratedwith individual developers, but we also thought about trends in game development.

When we thought about our most treasured gamingmemories, something kept coming back, something that we had lost.

When modern games start to push the boundariesof current hardware, rendering two or more scenes simultaneously becomes too resourceintensive, and so split screen couch coop has been fading from gaming.

But when all of your clients are in the cloud, couch multiplayer has new life again through Stadia in what we're calling stream connect.

In the past, the resources required to executesplit screen coop have required developers to sacrifice more of their creative goals.

With stream connect, we're making it possibleto realize split screen multiplayer without any performance penalty.

Behind me you'll see a technology proof ofconcept that we built at Google.

It's called the night forest, a coop demowith asymmetric player roles.

Here we have two players, one hunter on theground and a supporting aerial player, set up in a standard split screen view.

Each of these screens is powered by a separateStadia instance.

But what would happen to squadbased gamesif developers could allow players to call up the views of their teammates on demandor utilize any polygonal surface as a receiver for another player's video stream.

Stream connect makes this possible with extremelylittle effort on the part of the developer, bringing dynamic, squadbased gaming into easyreach even for very small teams.

We've shown you three views but we can keepgoing.

We can keep adding streams and shape how they'reshown to the player, giving a designer not one but many cameras into a scene.

Now imagine if you could go beyond seeinginto players' worlds.

What if you could interact with them.

Here we have our streams configured into acommand center where a fourth player can coordinate the movements of our drone, scientist andhunter characters.

Now that coordinator is reaching into theworld and placing a beacon to call attention to a particular location, seen instantly bythe other players.

Stream connect is just one of the ways Googleis working to support developers in creating more immersive and creative experiences, whetherbringing back effortless couchbased coop or inventing entirely new multiplayer games.

Our next technology demo focuses on the powerof the Google cloud and machine learning and how they can have an impact on acceleratingdeveloper creativity.

Every developer feels the burn in preproductionto get to a game's magic sooner.

We think Google's machinelearning technologymight have some answers.

Here to talk about it is a developer knownfor creating some amazing stylish and celebrated independent games, including dead light, RIMEand the invisible hours.

Please welcome chairwoman of Tequila works, Luz Sancho.

[Applause]Luz Sancho: Thank you, Erin.

I am very excited to be here for the unveilingof the Stadia platform.

There are so many different benefits thatStadia delivers to all developers, big and small, and particularly for a studio likeours.

At Tequila works, we are very proud of theart styles of our games.

It's something we spend a lot of time perfecting.

Our development cycles typically last 24 months, and as you can imagine, a large part of that time is dedicated to defining the art andstyle of the game.

We are particularly proud of RIME.

Its visual identity created a lasting impressionwith our players, but it took us a long time to get to that final style.

That's why we were so excited to hear fromGoogle about one of the tools they are making available, an amazing tool that will dramaticallyinfluence and ease this process.

With style transfer ML, Google is applyingthe science of machine learning to art visualization.

Erin HoffmanJohn: Style transfer is a machinelearning technology that runs on the video frame created by the game.

All of this happens in real time on a Stadiainstance.

We built this demo to show you what it cando.

We start with a gray box world and take anyimage we want, in this case Kandinsky's yellow, red, blue and the model does the rest.

Throw it starry night and you have anotherstyle.

Give it scratch art, and you get this.

We're doing our part to empower the artistinside of every developer.

The R�&�D team iterated through hundredsof art styles testing this technology, and one of our favorites came from an old friend.

What excites us and some of our partners sofar is how many playable art styles we can create just by feeding it more and more images.

It inspires and empowers our artists to getthe visions in their heads into interactive environments in a whole new way, and thisis just the beginning.

Luz Sancho: We are using a style transfermade in our studio today and we are blown away by the impact it's having on our latestcreations.

You will see it.

This could really change everything.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

[Applause]Erin HoffmanJohn: Thank you, Luz.

With style transfer, our goal is to help developersfind the magic of their games quicker.

You can check out style transfer during theshow this week.

We can't wait to hear your feedback.

Creators inspire us to bring the best of Googleto games, and creators are at the heart of Stadia.

It isn't just what they create, but how thosemoments are experienced by players, moments that resonate for generations to come.

The last feature we want to introduce todayis another special experience made possible by the cloud.

It's called state share.

And here to talk about it from Q games isDylan Cuthbert.

[Applause]Dylan Cuthbert: Hey, everyone.

It's great to be here with all of you today.

As a veteran game developer, I love how creatorson YouTube have brought our games to life.

But I've always wished those experiences couldbe more social, and even more fun.

I'm extremely excited by what I've learnedfrom Google about bringing new ways to share a game's replayable moments.

With a new technology called state share, developers can let a player instantly share a playable moment from a game.

This could include the world state, the player'sposition, items they're carrying, anything the developer wants to pack into a shareablemoment.

The game's state can be encoded into a linkthat tells Stadia where to pick up the game.

This could be sent to one player, or it couldbe shared with thousands at the same time on YouTube, through Email, apps, messagingor wherever links can go.

To me, this totally changes how I think aboutthe experiences for players.

I can create moments specifically for thiskind of sharing, challenges to beat my incredible speed runs or chances for other players toalso experience those same tough boss battles.

I can build as many shareable moments as Iwant and let the internet turn my whole game into an infinitely replayable treasure hunt.

I was so intrigued with the possibilitiesof state share that I designed a brand new game around it and it's the biggest titleever for Qgames.

Right now, it's still under wraps, but I can'twait to reveal more about this game later this year.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

[Applause]Erin HoffmanJohn: Thanks, Dylan.

State share is one more way that Stadia isworking to empower developers with entirely new tools that embrace a player's desire todiscover, share and build a community.

We are extremely excited by the receptionit's gotten from our early partners so far.

And with that, I'd like to introduce the headof gaming at YouTube to tell you what Stadia means for content creators.

Please welcome Ryan Wyatt.

[Applause]Ryan Wyatt: Thanks, Erin.

I'm very excited to be here at the unveilingof Stadia.

As you've heard, Stadia's about deliveringthe best developer experience so that the best games can be made, but we're also committedto making sure that we have the best creator experience so that the entire community getsstronger together.

YouTube is where people come to watch gaming.

More than 200 million gamers come to YouTubeevery single day to engage with their favorite games and creators.

And they come because of the community ofgaming creators and viewers who have turned YouTube into the gaming platform that it istoday.

We're always looking for ways to strengthenthe connection between creators and viewers, and Stadia is designed to bring them togetherlike never before.

Gaming has always been the backbone of YouTubesince the platform first was founded in 2005.

And one thing YouTube gaming creators wantis to engage with their fans.

That will always be the most important thingto them.

That's why over 50 billion hours of gamingcontent was watched on YouTube last year alone.

And to just give you an idea of how much 50billion hours is, you could walk to Pluto and back more than a dozen times.

Stadia's focused on empowering both creatorsand viewers to achieve new heights by breaking barriers of content capture and creating uniqueways to engage with and grow a creator's audience.

Established creators will have new ways toengage and monetize on YouTube with Stadia features, and with aspiring creators, we'regoing to break down the barrier of entry in capturing content by giving you the abilityto highlight, live stream and capture directly from Stadia.

We've already seen the idea of any YouTubelink being a direct access point into the game, and that is a huge opportunity for bothbig and small creators.

We're empowering creators to forge deeperconnections with their audience, and one of those ways will be to make it easier to actuallygame with them.

Often when you're watching a stream, you findyourself wishing you could be in there playing alongside with your favorite creators.

On traditional platforms, you would have tofire up your console or your PC and just hope that you get matched up with them.

However, with Stadia, and a new feature calledcrowd play, you'll be able to simply click a button displayed right in the stream andjump in and play with YouTube creators that you're watching.

Take a look at the video behind me.

It's a live stream of NBA 2K.

The person watching can simply click the linkand be placed into the lobby for the next game.

If you think about it, crowd play can actlike an allnew lobby system for games, and with Stadia, YouTube becomes the ultimatediscovery and engagement tool for content and, of course, YouTube creators will havefull management capabilities over this feature.

To all the game developers, publishers andthe millions of YouTube content creators out there, soon we'll have more information toshare on these engagement tools and how we'll be working with you to connect with and buildyour communities.

I'd now like to introduce a friend of mineto the stage.

He has over 11 million subscribers to hischannel the game theorists and he and his wife Stephanie have often been advocates forthe YouTube community.

So we were delighted to talk to them.

Please welcome to the stage, my friend, matpat.

[Applause]MatPat: Thanks, Ryan.

It's an incredibility honor to be here today.

Now, for us creators, our audience is ourlifeblood, whether we're breaking down the reallife science of the fictional world offallout, or diving into the theories behind bendy and the ink machine or simply screaminggame play on our live stream channel GT live, we're always looking for new ways to connectand engage with our audience, which is why, when I first met with the Stadia team, I wasfloored by the impact that it can have for not just gamers, but also creators.

Stadia not only empowers me to easily createand share my work, but it also unlocks completely new ways for me to build a stronger bond withmy audience.

Crowd play, for example, gives our audiencesthe chance to instantly jump into a game with us and then the creator can feature them liveon the stream in real time.

Another feature that I'm incredibly excitedabout is state share.

Here, the possibilities are literally endless.

Live streaming horror games, for instance, has been one of the most popular formats for live streaming on YouTube since its inception.

But now with state share, you can actuallytake this to the next level by letting the people who were just watching you replicatethe exact same scenario you just played through in game, like that impossible moment whenyou're out of med kits and you suddenly have a zombie breathing down your neck.

Imagine the endless variations that creatorscan layer on top of all their favorite games by specifically designing challenges orientedto their unique audience.

For creators, you suddenly become a game makeryourself, creating challenges through state share allows us to continue creating contentfor all your favorite games long after the game itself has been completed.

And, on the other hand, the audience now canreconnect with all their favorite games in completely new, exciting and fresh ways.

But, of course, also as a gamer, I'm lookingforward to tremendously all the new possibilities of game play that Stadia opens up and thatcan be built only for Stadia.

I mean, think about this.

A thousandplayer battle royale matches, incredibleyour graphical possibilities, and, of course, all of this is available across any screen.

Literally, I could just pick up my phone andstart playing exactly where I left off on my laptop even while sitting in an audienceof a keynote like this one.

I hope you're not playing right now.

A lot of exciting stuff happening on stage.

But you could do it.

Stadia just truly unlocks new opportunitiesto create, share and engage across YouTube.

I am personally thrilled about what Stadiabrings to the table, how it United States technology and entertainment and completelynew ways that we have never seen before and in ways that can only be possible throughthe combined power of Google and YouTube.

So I thank the Stadia team for having me inhere today.

I can't wait to see what else you guys havein store and I'll see the rest of you on the floors of GDC.

[Applause]Phil Harrison: Thanks, Ryan and mat pat.

Connecting players and creators to their favoritegames is core to our vision.

We've shown you how YouTube and Stadia offerthe ability for gamers to connect with content creators and game developers in extraordinaryways.

There is another Stadia integration with YouTubethat we're really excited about, designers love creating challenge, but as games reachmore and more people, the design problem of creating a perfect challenge gets more andmore difficult.

When a player is stuck on a level or puzzleand desperately wants that next beat in the story or the breathtaking views in the nextlevel, what do they do? Today, they have to leave the game, fire upYouTube, find the right video, scrub to the right part of that video and watch how it'sdone.

With Stadia, that help will be just a buttonpress away.

Take this example from our friends at crystaldynamics.

When the player gets stuck on a level, likeme, instead of grabbing a laptop or a phone, they just need to push the button on the Stadiacontroller to get help from the Google assistant.

No distractions.

No need to take your eyes off the game, andno secondary devices needed.

[Applause] it's another deep way in whichwe're connecting players with the games they love.

Stadia is about removing barriers for playersto get to their favorite content and moments.

With Stadia, any link can be an access pointto the game.

So for a developer, the entire internet canbecome your store, whether it's from our Stadia store, text messages, reddit, Facebook, twitter, discord, Google search results, YouTube videos, G mail or from the Google play store, gamersare going to be able to find, discover and enjoy your games anywhere they are, and easilyshare them with their friends.

It's a truly revolutionary way to discoveryour games.

Stadia will be home to a variety of games, and we're happy to say that we will offer comprehensive parental controls for all content.

We've already shipped development hardwareto more than 100 studios around the world and more than 1, 000 creators and engineersare hard at work bringing their games to our platform.

In addition to partnering with developersbig and small, I'm also thrilled to announce that today, we are forming Stadia games andentertainment, which will build experiences designed exclusively for Stadia as Google'sown first party game studio.

[Applause] and we've recently been joinedby one of the industry's most successful executive producers to lead that organization.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the newhead of Stadia games and entertainment, jade Raymond.

[Cheers and Applause]Jade Raymond: Thank you, Phil.

If you, everyone.

I am so honored to be here at the unveilingof Stadia.

In my career, I've been lucky enough to workwith some of the most talented and passionate developers in the world.

Passion is at the root of all great games, and it's what motivated me to join Google.

What I love about games is that we continueto redefine what a game is.

When I was 12, I saw the holodeck on an episodeof star trek, and even though the games I played at the time were side scrolling, pixelbasedkind of games like mega man, it was obvious to me that one day games would take placein fully immersive worlds.

Today, you have seen so incredible tech, andhopefully, like me, you now believe that we are on the brink of a huge revolution in gaming, one that will unlock a whole new level of creativity for developers.

There are no limits to the human imagination.

And now that the data center is your platform, the processing power is limitless as well.

I'm excited to announce that as the head ofStadia games and entertainment, I will not only be bringing first party game studiosto reimagine the new generation of games.

Our team will also be working with externaldevelopers to make all of the bleeding edge Google technology you have seen here todayavailable to partner studios, big and small.

We are committed [Applause]To going down the bold path, learning what is working best and sharing key tools andtech so that we can take games to the next level together.

The way I see it, there has never been a moreexciting time to be a developer, and Stadia will be a driving force, defining the futureof games and entertainment.

Thank you.

[Applause]Phil Harrison: Thank you, jade, and a very warm welcome to Google.

With Stadia, our goal is to combine the worldof people who play games and the world of people who watch games into one global communitypowered by the best of Google.

We've shared a lot today.

With Stadia, you'll be able to build yourgames backed by Google technology like Google assistant, ML and sensorflow.

You will be able to deliver your games tomore gamers across the globe through chrome, chromecast and pixel, and you'll be able toconnect with the biggest community of gamers and YouTube content creators.

So how do you get involved? For developers who want to create contentfor Stadia, we welcome you to go to Stadia.

dev where you can apply to get access to developmenttools.

If you want to partner with our team at Googleto help bring your game to market, we have Stadia partners, a program designed to giveyou the resources your team needs to make something great.

And for players who want to be the first tolearn more, you can go to Stadia.

com and follow us on these social channels.

So when will players be able to experienceStadia? I'm thrilled to announce that Stadia is launchingthis year, 2019.

[Cheers and Applause]we will launch firstin the U.

S.

, Canada, the U.

K.

and most of Europe.

It's been my privilege today to introduceStadia on behalf of the thousands of Googlers who have worked tirelessly to bring this visionto life.

This is the first step in the journey, andwe'll be connecting with you again in the summer to share more details on the gamesyou'll get to play at launch and beyond.

Thank you very much for gathering around withall of us today.

With Stadia, we can all dream bigger, andtogether, build a playground for every imagination.

Thank you.

[Cheers and Applause].