BUSINESS OF VIDEO GAMES

GOOGLE TO DISRUPT GAMING

THIS WEEK, MORE than 25 000 members of the video game industry are scheduled to descend on San Francisco for the geeky, and often sleepy, annual gathering known as the Game Developers Conference. This year, though, more people than usual are paying attention. Google is set to unveil a video game service, codenamed Project Stream, that will reportedly allow people to play Fortnite and other modern titles in a web browser or on a television using inexpensive hardware. If it’s successful, the system might herald the biggest shift in the $180 billion (R2.59 trillion) a year global gaming market since Super Mario jumped from arcades to the living room. Google has been privately testing Project Stream since last fall and just touted its announcement planned for today with a video trailer. The service will deliver games on demand, rather than as downloads, and is expected to support even the most fast-twitch and graphic-rich games, without the need for a PlayStation, Xbox or other high-end game console. It’s unclear whether it will work with existing Google devices like Chromecast or Google Home, or whether it will require players to buy new hardware. Nevertheless, the project is already being heralded as a portent of the industry’s future, where games are streamed over the internet and a new phalanx of heavyweights could dominate – not just Google but Amazon.com, Apple and maybe even telecoms. I Bloomberg