While many companies have created game consoles, only Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony have truly stood the test of time. Other contenders have come and gone, some with great ideas, and others with knock-off consoles you see for sale at Walgreens or CVS. Now it seems we may have a new player. The massive technology giant, Google, is rumored to be working on a game console of their own, codenamed “Yeti.” Should Sony be worried about this potential competition? Let’s find out! Google is Making a Game Console? While Google hasn’t announced anything, rumors point to a potential game console from the company that brought us one of the world’s largest search engines. They already manufacture phones, they have an entire operating system, are developing quantum computing, they have the highest educated employees of any tech company and they even released a VR headset. A game console doesn’t seem like much of a leap. The project, codenamed “Yeti” is rumored to be a cloud-based console that streams games over an internet connection instead of playing them on a console, according to a report by The Information published earlier in 2018. The rumor has surfaced once again, as massive gaming news outlet Kotaku, has reported on the console with new information. New sources seem to indicate that Google is taking a three-stage approach to their gaming plans: A streaming platform Hardware of some sort An initiative to bring more developers under Google’s name It’s no secret that Google has been trying to make some sort of splash in the gaming industry for some time now. It’s public knowledge that they were planning on purchasing Twitch before Amazon closed the deal, and rumors about an android-based console surfaced in recent years, but this didn’t go anywhere. Talk of the console, still codenamed “Yeti,” came back into the limelight when Google representatives met with several companies at the Game Developers Conference in March of 2018. Several meetings were also scheduled during E3 2018, with reports that Google is looking to outright purchase developers, as opposed to convincing them to make their games for the platform. While other companies like Nvidia and even Sony offer game streaming, common issues arise from modern internet connections. Pictured: The Yeti we hope inspired the codename To provide the same experience players have at home, internet connections would have to be very strong and highly reliable. Any dip in performance can hurt the game experience. Solving this problem would not be an easy feat. If Google could somehow circumvent these issues, though, they would be able to provide modern game experiences without the need to buy and upgrade hardware. The cloud servers would handle all of the heavy lifting. There’s also the potential scenario where the console hardware itself competes with Sony and Microsoft, but details on this aspect of Google’s plan are still sparse at best. Google customers are already using Chromecast and Google Home technology, so people are already used to having Google hardware in their homes. … Read More