Stadia is Dead and Xbox Needs its Best Feature (Premium)

Two months after declaring that it was not killing Stadia, Google, predictably, killed Stadia. Granted, the writing had been on the wall for a while: in February 2021, Google revealed that was halting all work on internal exclusives for Stadia and would focus the gaming service solely on third-party games. That led to plenty of handwringing, and not just because of Google’s well-earned reputation for killing products and services: key talent left the service, too, of course.

For those on the outside, Stadia’s fate may have seemed preordained and even deserved. But those who actually used the service discovered an inconvenient truth: with the right configuration---a Stadia controller connected wirelessly to a Chromecast Ultra, or, even better, via a USB-C cable wired to your device---the lag/latency issues that dog most game streaming services were greatly reduced or even non-existent.

The key to this system is that the Stadia Controller has its own direct connection to the game you’re playing in the cloud. That is, it doesn’t create a separate connection to the device that has the screen on which you see the game. This further simplifies the notion of using virtually any device with Stadia, but it has that other, equally important benefit of improving performance. It makes game streaming viable.

“The Stadia Controller identifies which screen or device you want to play on, and links it with your game session running in the cloud, ensuring the highest possible performance and the best experience with players,” Google’s Phil Harrison said at the Stadia launch in 2019 (fast forward to about the 20-minute mark).

Stadia isn’t the only game streaming service to adopt this system. Amazon launched its Luna service two years ago---right, I can’t believe it’s been that long either---and I wrote then that “Luna will offer a custom controller that will connect directly to AWS via your WIFI, much like Stadia.” When I tested the service the following January, I noticed that the controller performance was excellent with both a wired Xbox Wireless Controller and PC and the $50 Luna Controller used wirelessly with a laptop.

“Neither suffered from any of the lag/latency issues that I initially found troubling on Stadia, and the process for connecting the Luna Controller was much simpler than with Google’s offering,” I wrote at the time. “More specifically, I was able to navigate the action sequences in both A Plague Tale: Innocence and Metro Exodus without any issues, and that was pleasantly surprising … from what I can tell, controllers work very well with Luna, especially the cloud-connected Luan Controller. This is impressive.”

“With Luna Controller talking directly to the cloud, there is no need for device-specific setup, making it easy to transition your game from one screen to the next,” the Luna website explains. “Connect directly to Amazon’s custom game servers when playing on Luna, reduci...