I signed up for the free Stadia trial they offered awhile back. I wanted to get back into gaming, don't have any hardware to run modern games and have a fast fiber connection at home. I seemed like the ideal target user.
I spun up a classic, Serious Sam and immediately was disappointed. It looked okay 95% of the time but would randomly get tearing and input lag at critical moments when enemies appeared. I tried on different hardware and different connections and it was all unusable. I think the issue is even a minor lag in FPS games ruins the experience. Forget about playing competitive multiplayer games like PUBG or Counter-Strike.
I ended up finding an unexpected alternative. Microsoft offers Xbox All Access plan as low as $23 dollars per month for physical console + game pass ultimate. To me that has been a much more compelling offer considering I own the console after and gave me immediate access to over hundred games to play locally (including great AAA titles), a fantastic way to get back into gaming. Also, I found out you can plug in a keyboard and mouse for FPS games. Seeing smooth low-latency 4K games is so refreshing and stark contrast to Stadia.
At this point I don't really understand Stadia's target market. It caters to such a tiny intersection of groups that it's almost nobody. Stadia might stick around as a niche for awhile, but it's never going to be the majority of gamers first choice since running games locally is such a superior experience.
People kept trying to convince me that Stadia is fantastic with its supposedly amazing tech.
I live in a larger city and I am in the privileged position to have access to a top shelf internet connection, so I gave it a try.
It was not "fantastic", I would describe it as barely ok. Latency was surprisengly good I admit, but absolutely noticeable and annoying. If this is some kind of "future of gaming", I have to say it feels like a massive step backwards to me.
Fans will of course tell me that I am not the target audience given that I highly value these aspects, but I still have to wonder who is (good internet, short distance to data centers, at the same time not owning consoles or a PC).
Many people worldwide do not have the luxury of access to fast internet.
I think perhaps a bigger issue is that, presumably their audience is "people who currently like AAA games with huge graphics requirements", which are going to be "core gamers". Which are perhaps some of the most notoriously hard to please people in the world (I say this with some amount of love). And they take tremendous pride in their hardware (see: pc building subreddits, pcmasterrace, etc) and companies (nvidia, alienware, evga, msi, asus, etc) take great pains to market to them because they can sell to them at great markups just for making build quality a bit better than the usual dreck you find at Best Buy and slap on a bunch of alien heads and LEDs (again, I say this with some amount of love).
So I think the existing market is going to be really hard to crack for a lot harder-to-unseat reasons than just "it's a better experience" (which they can't provide anyway!). These people aren't cost-sensitive (generally) and will generally have pretty decent, dedicated hardware.
So I can only conclude that they're hoping to create a market of people who don't currently play AAA games due to cost or space constraints.
Which is consoles.
So yeah, I really don't know where they're going with this.
I'm biased, as a fan of stadia, but I don't think Google will kill Stadia, at least not soon.
They're closing their game studios, which so far have produced nothing anyway. As a platform to play games, it's basically faultless. Consolodating the product to play AAA games without having a buy a console seems like a solid move.
I might be wrong. Google might do a Google and shutter it though.
I've used Stadia on a 150ish Mb connection and it runs as fast as the game does locally.
I multiplay borderlands 3 with friends and very rarely have issues.
If there's speed issues, what Stadia seems to do is lower the resolution being transmitted, in order to maintain speed and low latency.
So the worst is some very rare periods of minor lower resolution adjustment for a few seconds then it turns back to normal. It's a blip.
It's never been an issue for me.
I love seeing Cyberpunk in max resolution on my 5 year old macbook or playing windows only games on Chrome in Linux.
The issue isn't bandwidth; Netflix can stream HD video over a 5Mbps connection, and Stadia should require about the same bandwidth as video streaming because that's essentially what it's doing (and sending input signals back the other direction, but those should be negligible)
What's much harder is latency. Who cares if your interactions with Netflix have a 500ms delay? For a video game, even 50ms is a problem. And you can't improve latency just by adding bigger pipes: there are unshakeable physical limits around how long it takes an electrical signal to go to and from a data center X miles away, and on top of that there's the rat's nest of routing that the signal has to go through along the way. The former can't be solved except by building out more datacenters so that more people are closer to them. The latter can be solved, at great effort, but I don't see ISPs having much motivation to do so. This is why individual experiences with Stadia are so hit-or-miss: it mostly comes down to luck, in terms of a) how physically close you are to a datacenter and b) how streamlined the network infrastructure around you happens to be. And I don't see a clear path for Google to significantly improve this over time.
The problem I have with Stadia is the target audience.
People who want to play AAA games, and
People who don’t care about latency, and
People who don’t want a console.
Honestly, who is this for? If you can’t afford a console there are options such as “Xbox All Access” which starts as low as $23/month. If you want to play AAA games and don’t want a console, you probably care about latency.
I want flexibility that includes quality games with quality graphics. I'm not looking for high-end gaming PC quality (which I used to own) but close to it.
Stadia hits that for me. I play it on TV and laptop depending where I am.
Gaming PCs and consoles will be around for a long time as they serve a market. I hope Stadia builds on their market fit and to become another platform widely used.
I've never used Stadia, but I have used xCloud and I can say that the experience is great, for some genres. Game streaming works really well for slower games, like dungeon crawlers and rpgs. for these games, it's 100% playable and is great on the train. There's some other games, like PUBG and forza, that just really don't make sense with the latency (This is on my cable nbn, I get roughly 7ms ping)
Stadia’s terribly laggy. Also hardware is cheap, why wouldn’t I just run it all myself? Just yet another attempt to get people renting instead of owning.
What's considered cheap is relative. $12 a month is more accessible than lump sums of $500. It may be cheaper to have your own hardware in the long run, but not everyone is able to afford seeing that through.
As for laggy, Cyberpunk runs orders of magnitude better through Stadia on my only computer - a dated Core i3 laptop - than natively.
You're not wrong. Running it yourself is obviously better if you have the hardware. It's just there is a value proposition with platforms like this that I think can make it so more people can play AAA games than before.
brocket|5 years ago
I spun up a classic, Serious Sam and immediately was disappointed. It looked okay 95% of the time but would randomly get tearing and input lag at critical moments when enemies appeared. I tried on different hardware and different connections and it was all unusable. I think the issue is even a minor lag in FPS games ruins the experience. Forget about playing competitive multiplayer games like PUBG or Counter-Strike.
I ended up finding an unexpected alternative. Microsoft offers Xbox All Access plan as low as $23 dollars per month for physical console + game pass ultimate. To me that has been a much more compelling offer considering I own the console after and gave me immediate access to over hundred games to play locally (including great AAA titles), a fantastic way to get back into gaming. Also, I found out you can plug in a keyboard and mouse for FPS games. Seeing smooth low-latency 4K games is so refreshing and stark contrast to Stadia.
At this point I don't really understand Stadia's target market. It caters to such a tiny intersection of groups that it's almost nobody. Stadia might stick around as a niche for awhile, but it's never going to be the majority of gamers first choice since running games locally is such a superior experience.
LUmBULtERA|5 years ago
Where are you able to buy this? It's sold out everywhere when I just looked.
2pEXgD0fZ5cF|5 years ago
I live in a larger city and I am in the privileged position to have access to a top shelf internet connection, so I gave it a try. It was not "fantastic", I would describe it as barely ok. Latency was surprisengly good I admit, but absolutely noticeable and annoying. If this is some kind of "future of gaming", I have to say it feels like a massive step backwards to me.
Fans will of course tell me that I am not the target audience given that I highly value these aspects, but I still have to wonder who is (good internet, short distance to data centers, at the same time not owning consoles or a PC).
Many people worldwide do not have the luxury of access to fast internet.
cashewchoo|5 years ago
So I think the existing market is going to be really hard to crack for a lot harder-to-unseat reasons than just "it's a better experience" (which they can't provide anyway!). These people aren't cost-sensitive (generally) and will generally have pretty decent, dedicated hardware.
So I can only conclude that they're hoping to create a market of people who don't currently play AAA games due to cost or space constraints.
Which is consoles.
So yeah, I really don't know where they're going with this.
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
nickelcitymario|5 years ago
maxehmookau|5 years ago
They're closing their game studios, which so far have produced nothing anyway. As a platform to play games, it's basically faultless. Consolodating the product to play AAA games without having a buy a console seems like a solid move.
I might be wrong. Google might do a Google and shutter it though.
nickthemagicman|5 years ago
If there's speed issues, what Stadia seems to do is lower the resolution being transmitted, in order to maintain speed and low latency.
So the worst is some very rare periods of minor lower resolution adjustment for a few seconds then it turns back to normal. It's a blip.
It's never been an issue for me.
I love seeing Cyberpunk in max resolution on my 5 year old macbook or playing windows only games on Chrome in Linux.
brundolf|5 years ago
What's much harder is latency. Who cares if your interactions with Netflix have a 500ms delay? For a video game, even 50ms is a problem. And you can't improve latency just by adding bigger pipes: there are unshakeable physical limits around how long it takes an electrical signal to go to and from a data center X miles away, and on top of that there's the rat's nest of routing that the signal has to go through along the way. The former can't be solved except by building out more datacenters so that more people are closer to them. The latter can be solved, at great effort, but I don't see ISPs having much motivation to do so. This is why individual experiences with Stadia are so hit-or-miss: it mostly comes down to luck, in terms of a) how physically close you are to a datacenter and b) how streamlined the network infrastructure around you happens to be. And I don't see a clear path for Google to significantly improve this over time.
viggity|5 years ago
cwhiz|5 years ago
People who want to play AAA games, and
People who don’t care about latency, and
People who don’t want a console.
Honestly, who is this for? If you can’t afford a console there are options such as “Xbox All Access” which starts as low as $23/month. If you want to play AAA games and don’t want a console, you probably care about latency.
I just don’t get it.
bhaile|5 years ago
Gaming PCs and consoles will be around for a long time as they serve a market. I hope Stadia builds on their market fit and to become another platform widely used.
byhemechi|5 years ago
Jkvngt|5 years ago
fruzz|5 years ago
As for laggy, Cyberpunk runs orders of magnitude better through Stadia on my only computer - a dated Core i3 laptop - than natively.
You're not wrong. Running it yourself is obviously better if you have the hardware. It's just there is a value proposition with platforms like this that I think can make it so more people can play AAA games than before.