After revealing more details like pricing and release window back at E3, Google spent its most recent Stadia Connect just talking about games coming to its upcoming streaming subscription platform. And it’s a pretty exciting lineup. Destiny 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Mortal Kombat 11, Samurai Shodown, Watch Dogs Legion, Elder Scrolls Online, Doom Eternal, Borderlands 3, Destroy All Humans, and more are on deck. But as cool as these individual games are, we remain skeptical of Stadia as a platform on a fundamental level.
Given how much the gaming community has been buzzing about a recent announcement you’d think it’s already E3, not just GDC. But yeah it turns out when a company as huge as Google launches a new video game initiative that could fundamentally change the industry, folks are going to talk about it. Google just revealed Stadia, a new streaming platform that eschews traditional game consoles so players can easily access the best versions of the biggest games on any online connected Chrome device.
Streaming video games isn’t a new idea. OnLive tried it. PlayStation has it. Nvidia has it. And Xbox is about to have it. But with the amount of effort Google is poised to put into Stadia, AAA video game streaming could penetrate the mainstream like never before. So when we talk about our thoughts on Stadia, good and bad, we’re also talking about our thoughts on streaming being the future of playing video games as a medium, good and bad. And after a few days of thinking about Stadia, we’re mostly skeptical. Here’s why.
Latency in Single-Player Games
Google Stadia can have the most powerful computers in the world in its back end, but if the connection has an unplayable amount of latency then the concept is basically useless. Google says 25 megabit internet speeds can get 1080p/60fps streams. And the controller’s cloud connection should help with input latency. We already accept some amount of lag in online multiplayer games, but lag in a single-player and otherwise offline game is a problem that doesn’t have to exist.
Destroying Data Caps
I’m sure Google Stadia can run just fine in a sterile and controlled San Francisco tech show. But in the real world people have to pay for internet connections they can’t even always rely on. If your data is limited in any way, or just slow because of where you live, that could wreck any Stadia experience. You can’t wait for 5G (or Google Fiber) to save you.
YouTube Culture Is Bad
One of Stadia’s big selling points is letting players interact even more closely with the streamers they watch and follow. And in theory hopping into a game with your favorite YouTuber sounds like fun. But have you seen YouTube? It’s an utter cesspit that’s slowly radicalizing children into fascist Nazis through its uncaring algorithms. We need to be burning that culture to the ground, not integrating it even more closely with our video game platforms.
We Can’t Own Anything, We Can’t Save Anything
As we shift more toward digital rather than physical media, the cost of this convenience is giving up our rights to ever own anything again. I can still play my Wii discs. But my WiiWare games are all gone forever. And Stadia represents an even bigger shift towards this bad rental-driven corporate control of culture. Even more distressing, streaming makes it even harder to archive the history of video games as art. And we all know companies don’t care about preserving these legacies on their own.
Google’s History of Abandonment
Remember Google Plus, Google Buzz, Google Glass, and all these other big projects Google hyped up before abandoning them after getting bored? Right now Google seems very committed to Stadia, even hiring a whole team of very knowledgeable gaming executives to head the project. But if it doesn’t work out, would you be that surprised if they just forgot it ever happened? We just hope they don’t hurt a bunch of developers by wooing them only to pull the rug out.
Player Privacy
So much of Google’s business relies on harvesting user data for advertisers. With that in mind do you really want to use a Stadia controller with a microphone always potentially listening in? Privacy violations are a massive issue in tech, and in general much of Stadia feels like Google bringing even more larger tech issues into video games.
What’s The Business Model?
We don’t know yet how exactly you pay for games on Stadia. Is it a subscription service? Is it a new kind of Google Play store? How will the revenue sharing work compared to Steam or the Epic Games Store? Do developers get paid based on how long someone streams a game like Spotify? We expect to get answers soon since the service launches this year, but these are economic questions worth asking before getting too excited about Stadia upending the entire video game industry.
Where are the Games???
Aside from Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, from Google’s previous stream test, and Doom: Eternal, a game scalable enough to work on Nintendo Switch, we really don’t know what actual video games we can expect to play on Stadia. Previously we said bad connections could kill an otherwise intriguing concept, but even more lethal would be a lack of exciting actual games to play.
