Google Stadia: company makes a play for gamers with new streaming service

Stadia, which will allow users to play games on any device, will launch later in 2019

Google announced its entry into the video game market with Google Stadia, a service that will allow players to stream video games to any screen - phone, tablet, TV or computer.

Google announced Stadia at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. The cloud-powered service will allow users to log in from any screen using the Chrome browser, a Chromecast device or a Google Pixel phone or tablet and play the same games across all of them, with all the computational heavy-lifting done by Google's servers instead of a games console. It means that players won't have to purchase a box that sits under the TV in order to play, theoretically liberating video games from hardware altogether.