Windows games running on Stadia without developers having to modify them? According to the details revealed about the next ‘Google for Games Developer Summit’, Marcin Undak (responsible for Stadia’s ‘Porting Platform’) is scheduled to report on March 15 the technical details about the development of its Windows emulator for Linux and of its use to run games on your platform.
The session given by Undak is expected to last 22 minutes, and is described in the following terms on his website:
“How to write a Windows emulator for Linux from scratch?”
“In-depth look at the technology behind Google’s solution for running unmodified Windows games on Stadia. We’ll take a detailed technical walkthrough of some of the core concepts with the goal of allowing curious programmers better understand such technologies and potentially develop their own“.
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What does this announcement represent for Stadia?
Apparently, Google intends to encourage developers in this way to port their titles to the Stadia platform, something that has cost them so far: that it is based on Linux has slowed down the growth of its catalogand has prevented it from offering its users some renowned video games.
This announcement is even more relevant considering would contradict the latest rumors that Google was planning to abandon Stadiaarising from the announcement of its plans to sell its technology to third parties, such as the video game distributor Capcom.
It is not clear how much effort this will entail for game developers: it follows that the emulator will need to be customized for each game (otherwise, it would be enough for Google to incorporate it into the platform in a transparent way for the developers), but in any case it is sure to be less expensive than porting entire games to Linux.
In the background, Google would not be more than reproducing in Stadia the same steps that Valve took to add the Proton compatibility layer (based on Wine), which allows your Windows games to run on Linux systems as well, by translating Direct3D API calls to Vulkan. In less than three years, this technology has changed the world of gaming on Linux, allowing more than 14,000 games to run.