Yesterday, Business Insider came out with a report saying that Google has more or less turned its back on the development of Stadia, as the vast majority of the focus over there now is to sell the underlying tech itself, rather than focus on the front-end Stadia product.
Among the potential suitors for the streaming tech, which Google is reportedly rebranding “Google Stream,” there were names like Peloton that came up but also…Bungie? Yes, that Bungie, the Destiny 2 developer that was just purchased by Sony for $3.6 billion.
….why?
Well, that may be complicated, albeit not altogether illogical. Bungie is one of the Stadia’s oldest partners, as Destiny 2 has been a flagship game for Stadia from the start, with the tech allowing Destiny 2 to run relatively smoothly on the streaming service, and Bungie and Google have worked closely on making that happen.
While Stadia remains just a fractional part of the Destiny 2 playerbase compared to console and PC, Bungie apparently got pretty deep into talks with Google about buying the Stadia tech for their own use.
We do not know the state of this deal, especially now that Sony acquired Bungie and no doubt has its own plans for game streaming. It may be dead, but if not, what’s the goal here?
My guess is that it’s twofold.
First, if Stadia itself does become defunct (which looks like a real possibility, despite denials from the Stadia camp in the wake of this report), Bungie could simply have a “Destiny App” where you can load up and play the game on say, mobile devices or sub-par PCs, and simply stream it rather than needing it to run natively, pretty much how Stadia works now. The streaming tech could also open up additional partnerships. The Verge’s Tom Warren even wonders if such a thing could get Destiny 2 on 100 million Nintendo Switches, a streamed version of the game rather than a downloaded one.
The second part of this I would guess would be internal. Bungie said publicly how much they have relied on the Stadia version of the game to quickly test Destiny 2 while everyone was working remotely. Stadia streaming allowed for a smoother backend development process during the pandemic. Most of Bungie is still remote, but even when they do head back to the office eventually, they have been hiring for a whole bunch of remote roles around the country, and it stands to reason that the tech could still benefit them there.
Continue Reading : https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/02/05/why-was-bungie-trying-to-buy-googles-stadia-tech-for-itself/?sh=4e487f3921ec
