Google Stadia and Cloud Gaming

With Google Stadia’s release date quickly approaching on November 19, 2019 I wanted to give some of my thoughts on Cloud Gaming and the Google Stadia platform.

Cloud gaming is not a new concept prior to Google’s introduction into the market. There have been a few previous companies that have tried and failed like OnLive in the past. There are companies that offer this service today like Parsec, GeForce Now, and PlayStation Now.

Cloud Gaming

Let’s step back for a moment and talk about what “cloud gaming” really is. Most people are familiar with playing games directly their device of choice, and the game runs on that device’s hardware and thus may be limited by the user’s hardware.

Cloud gaming changes that by running the compute and GPU load of the games on a server hosted by the provider and then streaming the output to your device. This essentially turns your device into a monitor where all it’s doing is displaying what is running on a server somewhere else. Imagine it’s kind of like watching Netflix, only for video games.

For the consumer this means they no longer have to fork out hundreds or possibly thousands of dollars to get good performance and frame rates in games. You can get the same performance on what ever device you choose to stream the game because it’s not actually running on that hardware. Essentially it’s a thin-client / server model. The cloud provider is doing the majority of the processing power.

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Steam – “Pressure” Skin

steam_pressure_eased

Just a quick post about a recent discovery I made about a awesome looking Steam UI theme called Pressure. I’ve never been a fan of the default Steam UI and have always been using the Metro skin as an alternative. Metro is a good improvement over the default skin, but still nothing crazy. Pressure, on the other hand, is a recreation of the Steam Client’s UI with a focus on clean look and function mixed with beauty.

I’ve started using Pressure and have fallen in love with it. By looking at these screenshots I think you can see why.

It is very easy to install. You must ensure that you are using the current BETA version of Steam. To install the skin simply extract the provided folder to your /Steam/skins directory, install the fonts in the fonts folder, then restart Steam. Select the skin from the Interface options of Steam and you’re finished!

What Steam skin would you recommend? Comment below!