Yesterday I said there are times when I am an old man yelling at the clouds and to be warned this is going to be one of those times. Yesterday Stadia “launched” and by launched I mean a handful of people who pre-ordered on day one managed to get equipment shipped to them in time. I remember getting caught up in the whirl of the Stadia announcements and wound up putting in a preorder because I was curious exactly what this new era would bring. However as more details leaked out about the experience and how it would function I suddenly became significantly less interested and put in a cancellation of my day one preorder.
How Stadia works currently is that you need to have ordered the $130 hardware bundle that includes a special chromecast and a special controller. This gives you access to Stadia as a platform and gives you Destiny 2 bundled in as software. After that you end up purchasing the games on the Google Stadia storefront like you would purchase any other game. Above is a list of the games available at launch and the prices associated with them screen captured from an Android Police article. The prices are not horrible but they also are not exactly amazing given that most of the games on that list are pretty old at this point.
The last point becomes important when you consider how this has been marketed. This is being directed at those who already consider themselves mainstream or early adopter gamers. These are the same people who probably already have a handful of consoles capable of running all of these games save Gylt the sole platform exclusive, and in many cases also have a gaming PC that can similarly run the majority of these games. So again I find myself just not getting this. Stadia feels like a gimmick more than a legitimate way of providing access to something you didn’t already have access to. Stadia being a storefront and not a subscription service granting you access to all of these games makes even less sense.
The nail in the coffin for me however was when I realized that Stadia was being treated as a 4th platform and not simply co-opting the audience of an existing one. The game that comes free with the bundle is Destiny 2 and it requires access to a bunch of other players to be able to play it effectively. Sure Cross Save seemingly works perfectly fine on the Stadia platform, but you are limited to queuing with other Stadia users, which is a pretty tiny pool of players at the moment. If you wanted to play with your friends, you would in theory then need to somehow convince all of them to swap away from whatever their current platform of choice is over to Stadia. A lot of players just uprooted themselves from the consoles to the superior PC experience, and I can’t see anyone that did that willing to downgrade their experience to a streaming one.
The best article that I have read so far is one put out by the Verge. However pretty much every article or video that I have consumed over the last day and some change comes up with the same conclusion. Stadia works but there are compromises made to play a game on the platform. These compromises include a tangible amount of input lag and degraded image quality while playing the game. The Verge article that I linked has a good image slider showing the same scene on Xbox One X and Stadia in EDZ area of Destiny 2. Is it good enough to get in some gaming on the go? Absolutely. Is it going to feel like a console or PC gaming replacement? Probably not.
I think the biggest confusion for me is that being a 4th platform makes no sense for the long term longevity of the platform. Additionally it makes no sense to market this platform towards already indoctrinated gamers. I have said this before, Stadia absolutely makes sense in its free version that won’t launch until 2020, where you can simply buy a game and play it on either a mobile device or through a Chromecast without the need to buy any additional hardware. That lets people who might want to dabble in serious gaming do so without the initial upfront costs. What doesn’t make sense is selling this as “gaming without the console” when the only way to get access to it currently is to essentially buy a “console” in the form of a dedicated version of the Chromecast and a dedicated controller.
The other aspect that I don’t want to get into fully is the fact that Stadia has already missed the market. XCloud is currently in preview mode and offers support for playing around 50 games on mobile devices as part of the Xbox Game Pass service. It really is the “Netflix for games” and there has been a renewed push of trying to improve the Playstation Now platform as well. These are both platforms that have dedicated player bases and won’t essentially be isolating you into a multiplayer wasteland. Steam similarly is ramping up to make its own push into cloud gaming and there are already great PC based services like Parsec. My fear with this platform is it is going to go the way of Google Glass or god forbid Reader and be yet another product that Google has abandoned.
