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Today, Google unveiled Stadia, a service that will let people play video games without the need for dedicated consoles or high-end computers. Instead, gamers will be to play on standard laptops, tablets or phones, with all the heavyweight processing performed on Google’s servers.

The platform will let users immediately play any game that is available on the service, without the need to purchase it individually or download a copy to their device. “Stadia offers instant access to play,” said Google’s Phil Harrison in an announcement at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Stadia is a cloud gaming service, meaning that processing and graphics rendering will be performed at Google data centres. As a player moves around in a game, video of the gameplay will be streamed to their device. Providing the internet connection is good enough, this will happen seamlessly.

Players can also switch devices mid-game, such as by starting their game in a web browser on a laptop and then changing to a mobile phone. “It’s easy and instantaneous to move that game experience,” said Harrison.

Stadia can be used with existing USB controllers, but Google also unveiled a purpose-built controller, which connects via Wi-Fi to the game in the cloud, including a button that allows them to share video of their gameplay to YouTube.

Another YouTube integration lets players click “Play Now” on the site, which opens the ready-to-play game in a browser window within seconds.

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“It’s pretty revolutionary,” says Tanya Krzywinska at Falmouth University, UK. “It’s cross platform and that hasn’t happened before.”

The release of Stadia comes as the gaming industry shifts towards cloud gaming – competitors include Microsoft’s Project xCloud, Sony’s PlayStation Now and Nvidia’s GeForce Now.

Google launched a beta version of the service last October as Project Stream, which let users play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey through a tab in Google’s Chrome browser. “Internally, we were testing our ability to stream high fidelity graphics,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

An issue other cloud gaming platforms have faced is latency, a lag between a player pressing a button and an action occurring on screen.

At launch, Stadia will aim to stream games in up to 4K at 60 frames per second. A second, simultaneous stream can be shared to YouTube at the same resolution. This will scale up to 8K resolution in the future.

Krzywinska expects an upswing in metrics-driven game design as a result of Stadia’s launch. “They will be able to gather huge amounts of data about when people are playing [and] what they’re playing,” she says.

Stadia will launch later this year in the US, Canada and Europe.