AT&T confirms Stadia tech used in Arkham Knight stream, teases cloud gaming ambitions

Kyle Bradshaw | Oct 21 2021 - 8:57 am PT

AT&T has confirmed that their Arkham Knight streaming demo is powered by Stadia technology, while also teasing the company’s cloud gaming ambitions.

For months now, Stadia fans have been wondering what the future of the service might look like, given Google’s pivot away from first-party titles toward making Stadia’s streaming technology available to partners. While it was never made directly clear at the time, many believed that companies would be able to offer/sell their own branded cloud gaming services while running Stadia technology under the hood, a process known as white labeling.

AT&T, working with Warner Bros, launched a new streaming experience on Wednesday, which let AT&T Wireless customers play Batman: Arkham Knight in full from their browser. While Stadia was not mentioned by name anywhere on the page, it was immediately clear to anyone who had played from Stadia’s web app that this was powered by Stadia.

An AT&T representative confirmed to 9to5Google that the Batman: Arkham Knight demo — officially a “gaming experience brought to you by the AT&T Network” — is indeed running on Stadia’s streaming technology.

[…] this is being powered by the Stadia technology. For this demo AT&T created a front end experience to enable gamers to play Batman Arkham Knight directly from their own website and the game is playable on virtually any computer or laptop.

Update 9:42am: AT&T has also confirmed that the version of Batman: Arkham Knight that AT&T is offering is running on Linux under the hood, just like every other game that runs on Google Stadia today. Just as Batman: Arkham Knight is not available for Stadia players today, the game has also not previously been ported to Linux.

When asked about whether more games would be coming to AT&T’s streaming experience or if non-AT&T customers would be able to join the fun at any point, the company had no future plans to share. That said, AT&T does seem to have grander ambitions for cloud gaming as part of the “next era of gaming.”

AT&T is collaborating with gaming technologists, like Google, to help usher in the next era of gaming, making access easier for consumers, and allowing content to travel and reach more fans – all enabled by streaming and network technologies.

Only time will tell whether AT&T intends to launch a full game streaming service, akin to the company’s DirecTV Stream television offering, or if this is simply meant to demonstrate AT&T’s network capabilities and forward-looking vision.

Meanwhile, for Stadia, it’s clear that this is only the beginning. It’s now all too possible for media companies, network carriers, and even game developers/publishers to offer their own bespoke streaming service, powered by Stadia.