We know now that cloud gaming is the future of gaming, period. Google has taken the lead in this direction just recently, when it officially announced Stadia, the company’s very own cloud-based game streaming platform, which is set to go live sometime this year.
It’s expected a lot of other tech mammoths out there will follow its example, though we were not expecting Walmart to be one of them.
Reportedly, the company is currently exploring creating its very own game streaming platform. In a report from USGamer, sources who remained anonymous have stated that Walmart has been talking with game developers and publishers since earlier this year and the discussions stretched throughout the Game Developers Conference as well.
It’s unknown how far along the development of the service has gone, if at all, but, if we really think about it, it’s not that much of a surprise that the retail giant has decided to take this step. The company has been slowly becoming more and more involved in tech and has paid a lot of attention to its online presence lately.
Walmart has also created a technology division in Silicon Valley called Walmart Labs. The Labs have around 6000 employees who dedicate their working hours solely to improving Walmart’s digital branch.
A lesser known fact is that Walmart has a data center in Caverna, Missouri, chock-full of over 460 trillion bytes of data. These sort of data centers are at the core of companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Apple and, of course, Google’s Stadia.
What needs to be noted though is the fact that Google has been working on what made Stadia what it is/will become for several years; the company boasts over 7,500 edge node locations globally, edge nodes which will allow gamers to access games via the cloud.
In addition, Google has designed custom hardware capable of running its titles efficiently and will offer Stadia on virtually any device out there that can run Chrome, so let’s face it – that is pretty much every device there is.
Of course, we can expect this to be nothing more but an exploration on Walmart’s part – a way to test the grounds and assess if such a venture is even feasible for the company to begin with.
At the same time, there’s many different ways companies could go around making cloud-based gaming streaming services available to the public so, if Walmart does decide to get in the game, it will be interesting to watch how the retail giant will choose to play it.
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