Way, way back in 2019, Google sent off its cloud gaming platform Stadia in a state that I described at the time as being more or less a beta. A ton of seemingly basic features were missing, some for quite a while: for months after send off, the platform didn’t have achievements, a legitimate TV application, or family game sharing, among other shortcomings. For hell’s sake, its store needed basic pursuit functionality until the spring of 2020. Today, many of those complaints have been tended to, and Stadia is better than it’s always been — but it’s not as simple to get excited about as it used to be.
How it started, how it’s going
Game selection hasn’t arrived at parity with platforms like PlayStation or Xbox, but it’s improved significantly since the service sent off two or three dozen titles. Currently, Stadia’s enjoying major backing from a lot of huge publishers: EA’s delivered games like Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Madden, and FIFA. Square Enix sent off Outriders on Stadia simultaneously with other platforms in the spring and Marvel’s Avengers last fall, in addition to ported a lot of other games. What’s more Ubisoft’s brought many its titles to Stadia, including some of its biggest like Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed games.
Today, more than 250 games are available on Stadia. It’s not all exciting stuff — no one’s signing up to play Uno or The Addams Family: Mansion Mayhem — but in the past 12 months, we’ve seen big-ticket games like Far Cry 6, Madden NFL 22, Resident Evil Village, and Hitman 3 land on Stadia day-and-date with other platforms. During Cyberpunk 2077‘s troubled send off in late 2020, Stadia was actually perhaps the best method for playing the game. Smaller but still noteworthy games like Chorus, Farming Simulator 22, Life is Strange: True Colors, and Little Nightmares II have displayed as expected, too.
A surprising number of those games have been available to play at no additional cost with Stadia’s $10-a-month Pro tier. As a boost, Google adds a small bunch of games to Pro consistently, and when you claim one, it’s available to you any time you’re a Pro subscriber — regardless of whether you let your subscription pass and come back later. If you’d been paying for Pro since the earliest reference point, your subscription costs — as of writing, that’d be $260 including January — would have net you admittance to more than 100 games. They’re not really all bangers, but there’s something cool just about each month, including big-name games like Control, Jedi: Fallen Order, Resident Evil 7, and Mafia III Remastered, in addition to tons of cool, smaller indies like Celeste, Moonlighter, and the entire SteamWorld series. You can also read about RTX 3070 HP Omen gets tremendous $300 value cut with today’s gaming PC bargains from here.
So it’s difficult to say there’s any dearth of quality games to play on the platform, but it’s still missing some of the pillars of modern gaming. Stadia’s got Destiny 2 and PUBG, but it doesn’t have Battlefield or Call of Duty. You can play Dead by Daylight, but not Back 4 Blood. There’s no Grand Theft Auto V, no Skyrim, no Minecraft, no Among Us, no Fortnite, no Stardew Valley. A lot of mega-hit games you can take for granted on other platforms just aren’t here.
That Google’s been either unwilling or unfit to amass a catalog of games for Stadia that lets the platform stand its ground against non-cloud competition is troubling, and it makes me can’t help thinking about how the company views Stadia’s drawn out prospects. Nintendo’s had the option to stay relevant for a very long time despite frequently missing out on big-budget multiplatform games, but it’s done as such to a great extent on the strength of its exclusive IPs. Stadia, then again, has no such exclusives. Outside a modest bunch of small titles like Gylt and Outcasters, it presumably never will: Google shuttered its short-lived Stadia Games and Entertainment studio early last year.
Google has additionally started licensing the technology powering Stadia to third parties to use in their own cloud gaming products, a strategy some have speculated could mark the beginning of the company taking a more behind-the-scenes way to deal with getting a slice of the cloud gaming pie. It’s certainly possible, and taken with the conclusion of Stadia’s first-party games studio and Google’s penchant for abandoning popular products, it’s not difficult to interpret it that way. Stadia could stop existing in the manner we currently know it soon.
If that bothers you, that’s not really nonsensical. If PlayStation 5 control center were liable to disappear at some unspecified time in the next two or three years, leaving PlayStation games unplayable, not very many individuals would get them. I don’t actually consider it to be too much of an issue. Except if you purchase a controller or a Chromecast pack, there’s no startup cost involved with Stadia, and if you’re just purchasing the odd game that interests you or messing around with whatever appears in your $10 Pro subscription, there isn’t much to lose if the service dies. But I additionally approach multiple gaming platforms and more games than I might at any point expect to play, so I realize that’s kind of a privileged stance. If Stadia were the main spot I could mess around, I’d be less apathetic about its prospect done existing.
The reliability problem
For a drawn-out period of time, though, Stadia made up a huge part of my gaming diet. From November 2019 to today, I’ve played the entirety of Red Dead Redemption 2, Jedi: Fallen Order, Doom Eternal, Cyberpunk 2077, and many long stretches of Destiny 2 on the service, not to mention plenty of other games I spent less time with. Looking back on that time, I’ve had surprisingly scarcely any cloud-specific technical problems; Stadia’s stream quality on my home Wi-Fi network is honest to goodness practically indistinguishable from playing games locally.
But that isn’t universal. Everybody at AP has had a different experience with Stadia (unplayable” has been utilized). All Google recommends for playing in 4K is a connection that maintains a speed of 35 Mbps where you’ll play, but there are tons of other factors that can influence the quality of your stream: Other bandwidth swines on your network, that you are so near a data center, how reliable your Wi-Fi router’s connection is, et cetera. For its part, Google hasn’t been extremely communicative about those other factors. This unpredictability with regards to stream quality and latency is a gigantic barrier to adoption. If you meet every one of the requirements for a decent Stadia experience on paper just to find that reality doesn’t match that expectation, it won’t matter how great it is for me, it’s going to feel like it’s a terrible product to you.
Would it be advisable for you to sign up?
I think it’s a discount technological miracle that I can play high-end games on a $50 piece of equipment like a Chromecast (or basically anything else, for that matter) over a base-tier Wi-Fi connection. But despite my amazement at the tech, the fact that it performs ideally where I live, and my willingness to accept that I don’t actually possess the games I’m playing… it’s telling that I eventually got tired of relying on Stadia for my AAA gaming fix and bought a Xbox last year. I realize that’s not an option for everybody and that individuals without admittance to cutting-edge equipment are Stadia’s meat and potatoes, but I think Google’s courting a remarkably small demographic here.
Cloud gaming is going to be normal in the not-too-distant future, and if Stadia is still around by then, it could be a vital participant. But as Google is treating the product today, Stadia feels more like a supplement to than a replacement for gaming on nearby equipment. Assuming it’s reliable where you play, Stadia is great for someone who possesses a Switch but wants to play more demanding games occasionally, or someone who’s on the hunt for a PlayStation 5 but truly wants to play Resident Evil Village today, or someone who wants to steal a couple of moments of gaming on a Chromebook after the kids head to sleep.