What does Google Stadia Need?
A while back, I was a beta tester for Google's Project Stream, which the world now knows as Stadia. I was under the impression that I already wrote about it, but I can't find the article, so maybe I never did. There was never any NDA or anything (I actually checked with Google for this), so I can talk at liberty about what my experiences were.
In any case, here are three take-aways from my experiences with Project Stream and Assassin's Creed: Odyssey running through it.
- Residential broadband* in the US is not necessarily up to the requirements of Stadia.
- When it is, however, it is fantastic as an experience, and runs beautifully in the Chrome browser.
- It's really convenient to just click go when you get a game; Stadia offers instant gratification like nothing else.
*My internet is more or less the best I can get in my area, though it's slightly under what Project Stream listed as its minimums at good times.
Now, admittedly, I'm using Stadia here to refer to my experiences with Project Stream, which I'm going to clarify further.
One of the frequent issues I had with the beta was network connection. It was the holidays and I was sharing residential broadband that was sufficient for pretty much every other purpose for most of my time spent testing Stadia, and it didn't always hold up perfectly. If other people were streaming video, the feed slowed down a good deal.
However, that should be a limited hurdle in the future, and only really applies in places like mine where broadband can be iffy.
What I think is really promising about Stadia is its run-anywhere nature. It's device independent, and can be used with a good variety of inputs (I tested mouse and keyboard along with a controller on a PC, which was a limitation of Project Stream: it sounds like the final target platforms are much broader).
From a consumer perspective, it should be able to have a mid-tier gaming consumer market: those who want to play games similar to current-gen console titles, but don't want to have to pay for a console (or want to be able to access their games platform independently).
Google Stadia booth at GDC, courtesy of GDC and Wikimedia.
However, I think there are issues with Stadia. One of the disappointing things in my testing was that some features (e.g. language selection) were not available. Likewise, a lot of features that more hardcore gamers might expect, like mod support, competitive online play, or broad setting customization could be lacking (especially in comparison to a PC market). Competitive online play may be workable, but there's a slight delay: when my performance was okay I never noticed a significant input lag, and visual quality tended to degrade before gameplay did. However, it is an extra level of delay in the chain, and since Stadia can't necessarily be manually configured to run super-fast at the cost of detail, my money is on high-refresh speed displays and traditional computer or console powered gaming for competitive play, even lighter competitive play.
Assassin's Creed is an odd choice for testing as well; the game was playable and fine, but Assassin's Creed has always had a little interruption between command and action due to how it's animated and how it parses controller inputs, so it could have been masking some other limitations. I've heard mixed reports on Doom Eternal running on Stadia, so that's an issue.
But let's put aside any performance issues for a moment, since I think that these will not ultimately hinder the platform nearly as much as other potential issues.
Stadia must earn consumer trust. For it to appeal to hardcore gamers, it must have a significant game library, and it must have a back-up plan for if it goes under, since hardware operating costs will be persistent.
A model that would be amenable to me would be a subscription service for the cloud gaming portion, and games independently purchased through third-parties; I think that we might be seeing a hint for this in the fact that beta testers got a copy of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey with their saves copied over (I haven't had time to test to see if this worked perfectly, but haven't heard issues).
This means that Stadia becomes strictly a hardware intermediary.
One of the issues with streaming games is that it's difficult to justify owning them through Stadia if they'll be lost when the system shuts down. I was an early adopter of OnLive (a college student with a modest, though capable, laptop), and lost the few games I'd gotten on that platform when it shut down. I'm very hesitant to buy anything through a Stadia storefront, unless there is some guarantee of a copy on another service if Stadia shuts down due to operating cost.
In addition to making this much more appealing, there is a chance for Stadia-capable games that players already own being available just by linking an account. Whether Stadia would collect a fee for this or opt for a subscription or time-based fee is an interesting question; I don't remember OnLive that well, but I believe it was a one-off purchase per game, without additional fees (and a subscription plan for "all-you-can-play" games).
The real factor here is price. A subscription plan with games included could work, but it would need to be priced appealingly; $15-20, probably. It would need the latest AAA titles, and as a result would need to lure people away from traditional digital storefronts.
However, I'd imagine that a subscription plan with third-party game licenses (and the option to perhaps buy through a Stadia storefront) would also work well. Rental options could be a valuable alternative to purchasing, since Google could recoup both hardware and game license fees from them, making it a win-win scenario.
Overall, I'm optimistic about Stadia, but not sure that I'll use it. I like to keep a pretty beefy rig for enthusiast purposes, and I'm not sure that I would benefit from switching over. If my situation changed, I could use it intermittently. For instance when traveling (so long as my destinations had good connectivity), using Stadia and a cheap laptop could avoid bringing an expensive machine loaded with credentials and personal data.
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I thought the new gaming ecosystem sounds great, but considering how many Google products I've used and lost (Google Reader, Google Wave, etc) I'm just not sure I trust them to lock me in to their system, unless that portability to other services is offered.
I have to say that the whole system is pretty impressive... it sounds like they're effectively creating a new internet for their games through their data centers. At the moment my internet is hugely iffy... but I realise I'm probably an outlier in that regard in my area.
My worry is that games may no longer be for purchase. I'm sure we've all had situations where we're watching a show and it disappears from our streaming service... or a show we're loving is no longer available because the company that pays for it is creating it's own online streaming service (CW or DC as an example)... I imagine this will be all the more frustrating for games. I currently have a PS4, but can't play with my friends on XBox. Stadia solves the hardware issue, but just replaces it with a subscription issue... I'm on Google, but my friends are on Apple or Microsoft or NVidia or Value or Amazon... and I'm sure each platform will do it's best to lock in the best developers/publishers.
I think more competition in the area is good, but I'm worried that overall the customers will lose out, as we go from PS4/XBone/PC and splinter off into more and more monthly subscriptions. Should be interesting to see how it all plays out.
I am tentatively interested in what Stadia has to offer. Like you, I was in the Project Stream test, though I have access to some ridiculous bandwidth rather than basic out-of-suburbia bandwidth. Even with that advantage, what I received was a playable, attractive game – but one which clearly had to the graphics options pulled back to something more average. Much less pretty and clear than if I were running it on my own machine with my 1070.
In theory, I am the kind of market they should be interested in hitting. In practice, I’m hesitant because firstly I have a lot of money already sunk into games libraries, with a new one (Epic) on the way, and secondly because I’m not sure that the risk/reward ratio for Stadia is really there for me.
But here is what they really have to do to make a go of it:
The cost of playing games on Stadia and maintaining access to those games has to stay less than the cost of buying improved hardware every year or couple of years. If they can amortize the cost curve for staying at the cutting-edge of game visuals and deliver those game visuals to your screen, they will have a competitive platform.
Pushing against them, they’ll have to deal with the fact that a lot of people would rather “own” their games rather than effectively lease them. (And I use “own” more loosely than I might otherwise because unless you make a full backup of all the games you own on Steam, you’re not really in possession of them. They’re just in cold storage. But you could, and that’s important.) They’ll have to offer an experience that you can only get on Stadia, it’ll have to be useful to most people with the bandwidth that they have, and they’ll have to reassure people that the money that they’ve dropped isn’t going into a black hole.
For games that release simultaneously there and on other platforms, that means that the price is probably going to have to be lower on Stadia to compete with that release on other distribution channels, because the risk component on Stadia is a lot more significant and obvious.
Having watched the entire Google presentation, but thought I had was “what if I don’t need a whole virtual machine of that much power for the game I want to run?” If they wanted to sell it as a flexible virtual machine that I could run via a web interface and backend did it on to the Steam library I already own? That might be worth 10 or 15 a month, considering that my alternative would be to buy a console which would cost much more than that or something equally annoying. (Technically I already own a SteamLink so for gaming in my own house, that’s already covered.)
It’s going to be a tough sell. Until people can try it themselves under their own network conditions, it’s effectively vaporware. That’s the key piece of information that we need as a market to really understand what’s going on and whether it’s going to be a product that provides good value for the cost.
I had wondered about this new thing, thanks for the details! It definitely won't be an option at my house, our internet connection is pretty slow.
I too am not convinced that people will have the bandwidth to properly enjoy this tech, and if they do, will it place a significant drain on the internet as a whole. I love the idea conceptually, but I'm not sure it's feasible in practice.