Google Stadia arrives in the fall, as Google dives headfirst into the streaming hype by bringing its own game subscription service entirely sustained by cloud gaming. Despite the many unanswered questions about how Stadia will work for gamers, Google decided not to host a beta before the fall 2019 launch.
This year, Google Stadia will launch in Spain, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, the U.K., Germany, and the U.S. There’s surely a lot of internal, controlled testing taking place as we get closer to the launch but Google’s only live test will have happened a year prior to when Stadia arrives.
Last year, Google partnered with Ubisoft and quietly tested the Stadia platform under the code name Project Stream. Gamers interested in trying out the game streaming service could sign up to play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey for free via their Google Chrome browsers. The test ran from October 2018 to January 2019, and users walked away with a free copy of Odyssey in exchange for their participation.
“It was unfortunate that we only ran the Project Stream test in the U.S., and even then it was only a relatively small subset of players, but you’ve all experienced it for yourselves and you know it works,” Harrison told GamesRadar. “Geographically, the U.S. is the most complex place to test; just because of the size of the country. And actually, Europe — and particularly the U.K. — are … relatively easier to launch. So we are not going to do another test in the U.K. or Europe. If we had time we probably would have done so, but we don’t need to.”
Compared to other countries, the U.S. is among the worst when it comes to internet speed, affordability, and choice of internet service providers (ISPs). Despite this, a launch across 14 countries is a different monster entirely and even if Google were to do a public beta test there are bound to be issues when a service is rolled out to a larger user base. This might explain why Google has decided to limit Stadia access this year to those who purchase the Founder’s Bundle — a product that is only being offered to a limited audience — but we’ll see come launch whether or not this decision works out for them.
Imagine tapping a Zelda icon on your iPhone and jumping straight into Hyrule. A new open-source project called nxnative makes that possible by repackaging Switch games you’ve bought into apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with no emulator in the middle.
Why does this run so well on Apple devices?
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”