Google’s hot new amazing super awesome streaming gaming platform, known as Stadia, launched yesterday. Stadia is a cloud based gaming system that, in effect, simply streams the games to the device — your commands are sent over the internet to Google’s servers which actually run and process the game data, then stream the audio and video to you, ala Netflix or Hulu. Basically, one could better call it “remote” gaming, rather than cloud gaming, as nothing is really processed or done by the local machine.
Well, the first reviews are coming in and people aren’t too pleased. I’ll spare the complaints about the launch library, the controller, the hardware itself and focus on the core functionality of the platform, and playing games over the cloud.
Now let’s take a step back and look at what the key marketing point of Stadia actually is – get into the ecosystem, get devices that can function with the service, and say goodbye to having an expensive console in your house having to do all the work of processing the game data, having to wait for games to install on the system, etc. You just select a game you want to play, buy it, and you’re in, with Google’s servers doing all the brunt work.
The idea sounds solid, and in practice works, but it’s getting mixed receptions in the hands of players. This doesn’t surprise me in the least for quite a few reasons which we will touch on here.
Image quality degradation due to compression for transmission over the internet is the first problem many are pointing out. This doesn’t surprise me in the least, and with enough bandwidth available on ones internet connection it becomes a moot point and anyone who’s done digital video work will understand the details behind this.
The average person, however, will probably be turned off by this, as depending on your internet service you may get great images or you may get terrible quality.
That’s one half of the service though – the other is actual gameplay.
There’s lag. Period. Anyone who thought there wouldn’t be doesn’t understand how network infrastructure works — such is inevitable by the very nature of the equipment which allows it. I’m not going to go into a detailed look at the nature of the internet or the flawed concept of Cloud Gaming (that’s an article due for another day) but I will cover what people have experienced here, which is exactly what I thought would be the case since the day the device was launched.
Some are noticing minimal lag, and overall a fine game experience. These, of course, are many news outlets with far better internet connections than the average household. Some are seeing issues when using Wi-Fi to connect the device, but have those issues resolve, for the most part, when connecting the device to Ethernet. A direct connection will always provide less latency than wireless and the idea of someone doing such gaming over Wi-Fi is insane to me, but some people don’t have as much of a choice int he matter.
Others were able to fix issues if they went into the settings of the system and lowered some options, which I have to say probably isn’t the most user friendly way to solve issues — why not automatically scale the experience for a persons connection?
Many people found the lag something they could live with, which was good, but others notice it no matter what — I’ve heard of some reports of half-second or more lag between a button input and an action actually showing on screen. Such is simply unacceptable.
The crazy thing is, this isn’t a fault of the device itself or the system — it’s the very nature of networking infrastructure, and as I’ve said many many times around Twitter, it all depends on the quality of the infrastructure in the user’s area and how direct their connection to Google actually is when it’s all said and done.
Someone in the “hot” zone of a major metropolitan city will probably have very current equipment and top speed fiber gigabit or something, whereas someone like me, who lives in an area that’s due for some more updates, just doesn’t have those options — or at least doesn’t have them with a company they will ever do business with — and as such cannot take advantage of these devices at all.
To me the whole platform is doomed by the very nature of what it relies most heavily on — the internet. However, it’s still very early days for this upstart gaming platform from the tech giant Google, and I look forward to seeing what some friends who have ordered the device have to say, as well as how the service matures before Google inevitably kills it as they have so many services before.
I’ll leave you with a few of the first review articles to pop up on the hardware and let you be the judge. This is far from my normal “thorough” article, I’m just contrasting my original expectations to what I’m seeing and hearing.
https://www.wired.com/review/google-stadia/
https://venturebeat.com/2019/11/18/google-stadia-review-it-works-but-so-what/