Google Stadia Might Predict Your Button Presses to Deal with Input Delay

There are a lot of hurdles to overcome when it comes to cloud gaming, but Google seems to be investigating some extremely odd ways of doing it. According to VP of Engineering Majd Bakar, Stadia could use "negative latency" to set up buffers, or possibly even predict your next move.

Speaking to Edge magazine (via PCGamesN), Bakar says that "we think in a year or two, we'll have games that are running faster and feel more responsive in the cloud than they do locally, regardless of how powerful the local machine is."

But in combating the quirks of a streamed feed versus something housed locally, it sounds like Google is employing some new tech. A buffer of predicted latency, specified to your setup, could offset the lag you might experience streaming a game. This could, reportedly, include predictive button presses.

While it sounds cool on paper, there are situations where you probably wouldn't want AI to guess what you, specifically, would do next. Besides knowing way too much about me, I've also got some bad habits when it comes to genres like fighting games. I already know I should stop jump-kicking at a Guile holding down and back, so maybe Google's AI could just fix that problem for me.

Stadia is still building up to its big release sometime next month, though no specific date has been set yet. It did lose one of its big launch titles though, as Doom Eternal, originally set to headline the Stadia's launch, has been delayed to next March 2020.