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.
Where are you able to buy this? It's sold out everywhere when I just looked.
If you can't wait you could do a trial or couple months of Stadia (or GeForce Now, Shadow, etc.) until you can get your hands on one. Or play retro and indie games on your old hardware in the meantime, that's what I did. :)
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.
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.
And of course in 2007 there was no better alternative to youtube, whereas all alternatives to Stadia are better.
(Not being sarcastic. To my knowledge, no one has cracked this yet.)
My overall point in comparing to YouTube is that the internet WILL get faster. More and more people will have the kind of broadband needed to make this a good experience. I'm sure it sucks today. But what about 10 years from now?
Streaming video used to suck. Now it doesn't.
Streaming games currently sucks. Tomorrow it won't, and for the same reason: The infrastructure will catch up.
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.
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.
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.
It's seamless on a 150 meg connection.
Starlink has a 40 ms latency and that literally goes to SPACE and back THEN ALSO goes through all of the network routing issues that you're talking about.
So you may be overselling the latency problem.
You may have other issues going on? I don't know why you're getting 500 millisecond delays. I'm certainly not getting that.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsi...
(Whether or not you're playing multiplayer isn't really relevant, because those other people are talking to the datacenter, not your local client)
> You may have other issues going on? I don't know why you're getting 500 millisecond delays. I'm certainly not getting that.
I haven't personally tried Stadia, and 500ms wasn't intended as a representative example, it was just an extreme number for the sake of illustration.
I have, though, read reports from lots of people who have "good" internet connections, saying Stadia is noticeably laggy (just look at the top comment on this very post).
To get down to specifics, a latency of >16ms is a lagged frame at 60FPS (which is the standard expectation for the current gen of consoles, and has been the expectation on PC for many years). That time window also has to include actually processing and rendering the game state (you can throw hardware at this part, but only up to a point).
So, that Starlink figure of 40ms will still give you a pretty unideal experience.
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.
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.
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.
