Living with Game Streaming: Google Stadia (Premium)

2020 was, among other things, the year that game streaming services went mainstream. And the best of the lot, perhaps, is Google Stadia.

I know. I felt weird just writing that.

But it’s true: Google Stadia is broadly available, has a reasonably good games library, and can be used with more combinations of devices, and with more controller types, than any other game streaming service. (At least for now.) A Stadia customer can pretty much game anywhere they want, in whatever configurations they prefer.

There are problems, however. Of course there are. So let’s start there.

First and most obviously, Google is going its own way when it comes to game streaming, and maybe we shouldn’t pretend to be surprised by that. Unlike with other services, Stadia is free, or it can be, and those who do subscribe—at $9.99 per month—only get a handful of free games, plus 4K HDR and 5.1 surround sound support. But Stadia users are expected to buy individual games at what I’ll call normal retail prices. Cyberpunk 2077, for example, costs $59.99, just as it does on Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5. Ditto for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, DOOM Eternal, and other new titles.

I’m still not sure how I feel about that, since most game streaming services give you access to a large library of games for that monthly free, and that lets you easily sample titles until you find the one(s) you really like. With Stadia, you buy a game and hope for the best, I guess, just as we do/did on PCs and consoles.

Second, and perhaps more damningly, Stadia suffers from a lag/latency issue that can be more (or less) pronounced depending on which hardware setup you use (and, I assume, your Internet connection). I’ve tested Stadia in a variety of configurations, using a Stadia Controller and an Xbox Wireless Controller, wired and/or wireless, with various device types, including a PC. My best results were using the configuration that Google recommends: A Chromecast Ultra with a linked wireless Stadia Controller. But I still don’t have the same confidence in the reliability of the experience that I do gaming on an Xbox with a wireless controller.

So far, I’ve played several different games on Stadia, two that I purchased outright (Far Cry 5 and DOOM Eternal Standard Edition) and the others—like Dead by Daylight and PUBG—sampled from the small collection of free games offered to Stadia Pro subscribers. I’ve done so in a dizzying array of configurations, as noted, and with mixed results.

For the most part, Stadia works well, yes, and it somewhat mimics a console experience in that it is simple and easy to navigate. But in playing the action sequences in Far Cry 5, a single-player game, or in multiplayer games like PUBG, the latency/lag—I’m not sure what to blame here, exactly—results in a lack of preciseness, in both movement and weapon aiming, and it’s is problematic. I suspect this will be less true in different types of games, but it’s been pretty consistent in the titles I’ve tested.

The best experience, again, was with a Chromecast Ultra, which I had to dig out of a drawer and update, and a Stadia Controller. Setting it up was tedious and not obvious: You have to manually enable the display of Stadia controller codes in the Chromecast Ultra “ambient” display to get started, and then use a combination of the Stadia app on your phone and the Chromecast UI to get it all connected.

But once you do, the experience is pretty good. HDR is enabled on my 4K gaming display, as is 4K graphics. I’ve only played Far Cry 5 on Stadia, but DOOM Eternal looks just as good on Stadia as it does on my Xbox Series X, with lush HDR-enhanced graphics.

More importantly, the lag/latency issue does seem less pronounced. It’s not ideal, but it’s improved over the other configurations I’ve tried.

The thing is, when I moved from PUBG or DOOM Eternal on Stadia to Call of Duty on Xbox, the difference is immediately obvious. And while some of that could be related to the differences between the two games—I don’t have a way to test Call of Duty on Stadia, which I’d prefer—it’s not just that. The Xbox controller feels precise and reliable in ways that Stadia just does not.

Both games look great on Stadia, and DOOM Eternal offers a particularly immersive experience, with incredible graphics, music, and audio effects. (You may recall that I detested its predecessor, but this is a much better game.) Playing the game side-by-side with the Xbox version, the experiences are nearly identical from an AV perspective. And even the gameplay is nearly identical, at least at first, once you get past the controller differences.

But once you enter the first major fight sequence, in a large and complicated multi-level room (shown above) that looks like it was lifted from Quake III Team Arena (that’s a compliment), and are forced to fight many enemies at once, spawning all over the place in different locations, you can see the Stadia lag/latency issue. I died repeatedly in the Stadia version of the game since I found it difficult to target enemies during the frenetic action. But on Xbox, I breezed through this level and left it with 100 percent health, with plenty of health packs remaining.

And that, ultimately, is the problem and the challenge, not just for Stadia, I’d imagine, but for any cloud streaming game service. I have some ideas about that, but I will continue testing other services to see how they compare.