Google hosting ‘Gather around’ press event at the Game Developers Conference next month

In mid-January, Project Stream ended its four-month test trial of “Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.” Google today just announced a mysterious gaming-related press conference during the Game Developers Conference in March.

Google sent out invites this morning (via The Verge) for a Tuesday, March 19th event at 10AM PST. A cryptic GIF shows a bright light at the end of a dark hallway before “Gather around” and the Google ‘G’ logo appears onscreen. Given the game development venue, it’s possible that Google is planning an announcement related to Project Stream.

With Project Stream, Google set out to solve the biggest challenges related to streaming intensive, interactive content with minimal lag. Companies across the industry want to capitalize on how streaming could one day revolutionize gaming like it did music and movies. Google is leveraging its large cloud infrastructure to compete against the likes of Nvidia and soon Microsoft.

Early beta users were able to play a AAA console title right in the Chrome browser on Mac and Windows as long as they had a 25 megabits per second or above internet connection. If next month’s event is around Project Stream, Google will likely use GDC to detail how third-party developers can bring their games to the streaming platform.

For the past year, Google has been rumored to be working on “Yeti,” which has been used to describe both the service and related hardware in the form of a Chromecast-like dongle for TVs. The company hired a PlayStation veteran in 2018 to run its gaming division, and other top industry developers.

Google already has an annual presence at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco — which runs from March 18-22 — in the form of a Developer Day. In addition to a keynote on Monday and other sessions, Google has a booth at the conference. In past years, this event was aimed at Android development.

Join us for a full day, where we’ll kick things off with a keynote to share our latest news for game developers, followed by three sessions focused on innovation & new platforms, pre-launch best practices, and strategies to improve performance post-launch. Each session will include mini-talks from different Google teams and developer partners sharing new tools, learnings and more.