A Hailstorm of Stadia games? What Might Google’s Project Hailstorm Be?

If you’re a full-on convert to cloud gaming, you probably already have your suspicions of what Stadia’s Project Hailstorm might be. But if your interest in the likes of NVidia’s GeForce Now and Google’s Stadia might be described as casual or skeptical, we’ll tell you what we know and why we’re anticipating a hailstorm of cloud games this year — you’ll want to bring a few grains of salt.

When was it announced?

It’s a seemingly codenamed project for an upgrade of Stadia, Google’s cloud gaming platform. The word “seemingly” applies here, because Google hasn’t officially announced Project Hailstorm – at least not through conventional channels. 

In Stadia’s latest application package file, or APK, 9to5Google found a note. It teased, “a hailstorm is coming. Introducing Project Hailstorm from stadia.”

What might it be?

Some have looked towards Netflix’s own Project Hailstorm for clues to what Stadia’s might be. Netflix’s project made it easier for TV manufacturers to integrate its apps in Android TVs, trimming months of integration efforts down to weeks and days.

We suspect Project Hailstorm is something else. We think, and hope, that Project Hailstorm directly rates to a massive drop of new Stadia titles.

Last November, Jack Buser, director of games at Stadia, made some particularly frank assertions about Stadia’s roadmap of games. Buser told MobileSyrup that his team was planning to drop about 400 games, from a group of about 200 developers, over the course of the new few years.

The Stadia exec proclaimed that there will a steady downpour of games in 2021, 2022 and 2023. At the time, he proclaimed that his team was just about done with 2021 and working further out.

“2023 is really kind of where we’re aiming our sights,” stated Buser. “2021 is in incredible shape. Hopefully, that gives you a sense of the scale of where we’re moving.”

Hit after hit. If 2021 is indeed filled with the deluge of games Buser alluded too, we’d probably class that as a hailstorm. 

Of course, we could be flat wrong on this. So here’s a short roundup of some of the other ideas about what Project Hailstorm is:

• Android Emulation – it’d certainly be a storm of games
• VR support – is Stadia ready to have more people complaining about bandwidth requirements
• Expanded controller support – it’d be nice to put an Xbox or PlayStation controller on Stadia duty
• Upgraded interface – could it be a storm of little quality of life upgrades (though, a search bar would be major)