Google’s Stadia will push gaming to the next level, says The Insights People’s ceo.
Google’s Stadia is set to take the kids gaming market by storm and push gaming on to the next level.
That’s the view of Nick Richardson, ceo of market intelligence company The Insights People, who believes that Stadia – which was revealed yesterday – has all the attributes needed to be a commercial success.
The Insights People has seen how gaming has become the popular sector within the entertainment industry over the past two years. This has been largely driven by the rise of mobile gaming, while console ownership is decreasing.
At the same time, use of YouTube by 4-18 year olds on a daily basis in 2018 also reduced from 61% to 51% in 2018, as they increasingly begin to migrate to new platforms, such as the gaming-focused Twitch, which continues to grow in popularity.
With this in mind, it makes sense to The Insights People that Google – which owns YouTube – would launch a gaming streaming service that connects to YouTube in order to drive users back to the platform.
“Google’s timing is perfect to launch Stadia,” said Nick. “Clearly, the company and its new head of gaming, Phil Harrison, have seen the direction of travel for both the gaming sector and YouTube as a platform, and have acted decisively to develop a platform which has the potential to be perfectly positioned to become the nucleus of the gaming revolution we find ourselves in, as our data shows that gaming continues to grow, but console ownership in some segments is continuing to decline.
“Much of the success of Stadia will depend on uptake though. Online gamers regularly complain about the lag between performing an action on their controller and the action being performed in-game, so uptake of Stadia really will depend on how well the Stadia controller, which Google says will connect directly to the internet rather than through the platform to help decrease the possibility of lag, performs.”
Nick continued: “In order for Stadia to succeed then, it will need to quickly develop a stable of games for users to choose from ahead of its launch later this year, and when it does launch to users, it will need to not only compare to other gaming platforms, it will arguably need to outperform them in terms of usability and lag.”
However, Nick also believes that the opportunity for Google goes beyond targeting gamers.
He concluded: “We continue to see that this generation of kids are wanting to create their own stories, and with game developing one of the top career aspirations of this generation of kids, there is a significant opportunity for the platform to evolve to enable children to co-create in the building and development of their own games.”
Google’s Stadia is a new gaming platform for playing AAA video games across all kinds of screens, according to the company.
For more information on The Insights People and to receive a complementary copy of the Kids Insights 2018 Future Forecast Report visit https://www.kidsinsights.co.uk/futureforecast.
Want to read more news like this? Simply sign up to our daily digest in the box below. You can also follow @LicensingSource on Twitter.
