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 ga...