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.