Google Stadia Review – One Month Later

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It’s been pretty much bang on a month since Google’s Stadia game streaming service launched – I actually pre-ordered it specifically to make this video – and I wanted to see how it’s doing, if it’s improved at all from the launch reviews, and see if it’s even worth your money at all.

For some context, I’m just about old enough to remember, and have experienced, OnLive, a game streaming platform pretty similar to this that had their own controller, and honestly a near identical business model, that went defunct in 2012. The major problem for OnLive, barring the business decisions, was internet speed and latency. 

The gaming experience was a laggy, unresponsive mess most of the time, so you could understandably think that Google’s Stadia would be the same. Happily, it’s nowhere near as bad as OnLive once was. It’s much more polished, and high speed internet rollout is much better now than it once was making for a much better quality and responsive feel. 

Now Stadia, as a platform, is kind of split into a few pieces. First is the actual service you pay £9 a month for, the online game streaming itself. This can be done on any device, via a Chrome web browser, from your phone to a Chromecast. Then, there is the controller. This blue one is the Founders edition model, and the white ones you’ve seen are the new “Premiere” edition. The controller isn’t needed to use Stadia, but Google certainly “recommends it”. 

Since we are talking about the controller, lets have a quick tour and thoughts on it. First, you can see it’s a playstation layout, dual analogue sticks in the middle, with abxy buttons on the right and a painfully clicky dpad on the left. Also two bumper switches and two pretty long triggers. You’ve also got the stadia button in the middle, google assistant and screenshots buttons and menu and select buttons too. 

The controller feels a little weird in the hand, like my hands are bent to reach around it. The thumb sticks feel great though, nice quality tips and smooth motion to them. Like I mentioned the dpad is way too clicky for my liking, unlike the abxy buttons which are just right for me. The triggers are smooth too, but it’ll depend on the game how well they are implemented, as is the vibration motor which can be pretty strong. 

The strangest part of the controller is that it connects directly to WiFi, like it gets its own IP address and everything. The downside to that is that any level of network interruption makes the controller drop sync with the chromecast and requires you to hard reset the chromecast to let it reconnect. And that happened a lot. Like, i didn’t have a game session without that happening at least once. 

Which, i suppose, brings us nicely to the actual streaming service itself. I have the pro subscription for now, although they do have a free tier coming out next year that only goes up to 1080p 60, rather than up to 4k 60 on pro and still requires you to pay full price for the games. With pro, you get “free” games, so far it’s only Destiny 2 – which is free to play anyway – the old Tombraider, Farming simulator and Samurai Shodown, but they promise more to come. In total there is only 23 games on the platform you can actually play right now, although again supposedly more are coming. 

As for pricing of the games, they are full MSRP and I doubt they’ll be on sale any time soon. Most of the games I looked up were anywhere from £5 to 10 more expensive than their respective copies on Steam, and that’s without any sales on. With sales it can be over half the price, like the newest GRID game, it’s £55 on Stadia, but was just on Christmas sales for just £20 on Steam.

So, what’s it like to game in the cloud? Kinda, meh. Playing on desktop wasn’t too horrific, it did drop frames pretty bad at some points, and had a weird bug where my camera in Destiny 2 would skip about 90° in a single frame which was really jarring, but overall not any worse than playing at 1080p 60 on medium/low settings locally. Input lag for Destiny in browser was around 75ms, compared to locally which was around 35ms , so about doubt the time. For the casual gamer this isn’t a crazy difference, and so that’s not bad. 

Where it does get bad though is using the Chromecast. Using 5GHz WiFi – under 1m from the access point too – the response time was somewhere around 154ms – give or take about 5ms for margin of error. That is noticeable, very noticeable. It makes the couch gaming experience with the controller really not a nice time at all and makes it very hard for me to recommend. You can make it ever so slightly better with ethernet into the Chromecast Ultra’s power adapter – which by the way uses USB 2 meaning at best this is running at around 480Mbps, but in reality is more like 300, but anyway the input lag there totalled a little less, at 138ms average. Again, better, but not by much.

Combine that with the regular dropouts, low overall image quality, and other recurring bugs I really can’t recommend this to anyone, even the casual gamer. Honestly, I have an inherent bias against this kind of hardware-as-a-service platform, since while yes, you get “free upgrades to the latest hardware”, you don’t own anything. You have to buy the games at a crazy high markup and without a really, really solid internet connection, that’s all pretty much worthless to you too. All of that, and if Google decides to stop serving your country – or as we saw with the USA and Huawei, Google gets blocked from operating in your country, you are flat out screwed. 

And of course I have to mention, lack of resolution or settings options, no high refresh rate, and an honestly tiny game platform make this something that really isn’t for me, and I don’t think for anyone else, yet anyway.

See, Stadia has potential. I mean it’s made by Google, it’s got the money behind it, they have the server infrastructure already, and internet speeds are getting good enough to just about make this real – for context I saw about 30mbps usage on my internet when playing Destiny 2 – it just needs more refinement, more games, and ideally a new business model but maybe im dreaming too much on the last one. 

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