It’s no secret that Google is seeking to ‘disrupt’ the gaming market – the corporate’s Project Stream technical take a look at ran for a number of months, and allowed participants to play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey in a Chrome browser tab – no set up required. Now, Google has filed a patent utility for its personal game controller, and there’s extra to it than meets the attention.
The diagrams for the Google controller (which Thurrott noticed yesterday) aren’t notably particular or shocking: they present the form of wi-fi, two-handed, dual-thumbstick design with the usual array of face buttons, D-pad, and triggers we’ve develop into accustomed to over the previous couple of console generations. The solely Google-specific element within the diagrams is the inclusion of a Google Assistant icon on the decrease fringe of the controller’s face, which could possibly be a button or light-up indicator.
What’s extra attention-grabbing are the options Google describes in the patent application text. Instead of getting used with a particular machine, the Google controller could be used with a number of units and machine varieties – so you would have one controller that labored throughout a tv display, a PC, a pill, and a cell phone.
Further, the patent suggests Google needs customers to have the ability to obtain notifications from cloud-based games on the controller, after which select which of these potential units to make use of to answer these notifications.
Google additionally says within the utility that a number of customers would probably retailer profile and game data on the controller itself, permitting them to make use of the controller as an account key to its streaming service with any machine that’s appropriate.
Take the sticks: The best PC controller
What this all probably means is that when Google presents its massive keynote at GDC in San Francisco subsequent week, it received’t be revealing any ‘Googlebox’ console in any respect. Instead, it appears possible it’ll be asserting a subscription service for streaming triple-A games on something that may deal with streaming video, and that you just’ll be capable to entry from wherever utilizing an easily-portable controller.
Whatever it’s, we’ll discover out for certain March 19.
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