I signed up for the free Stadia trial they offered awhile back. I wanted to get back into gaming, don't have any hardware to run modern games and have a fast fiber connection at home. I seemed like the ideal target user.<p>I spun up a classic, Serious Sam and immediately was disappointed. It looked okay 95% of the time but would randomly get tearing and input lag at critical moments when enemies appeared. I tried on different hardware and different connections and it was all unusable. I think the issue is even a minor lag in FPS games ruins the experience. Forget about playing competitive multiplayer games like PUBG or Counter-Strike.<p>I ended up finding an unexpected alternative. Microsoft offers Xbox All Access plan as low as $23 dollars per month for physical console + game pass ultimate. To me that has been a much more compelling offer considering I own the console after and gave me immediate access to over hundred games to play locally (including great AAA titles), a fantastic way to get back into gaming. Also, I found out you can plug in a keyboard and mouse for FPS games. Seeing smooth low-latency 4K games is so refreshing and stark contrast to Stadia.<p>At this point I don't really understand Stadia's target market. It caters to such a tiny intersection of groups that it's almost nobody. Stadia might stick around as a niche for awhile, but it's never going to be the majority of gamers first choice since running games locally is such a superior experience.
People kept trying to convince me that Stadia is fantastic with its supposedly amazing tech.<p>I live in a larger city and I am in the privileged position to have access to a top shelf internet connection, so I gave it a try.
It was not "fantastic", I would describe it as barely ok. Latency was surprisengly good I admit, but absolutely noticeable and annoying. If this is some kind of "future of gaming", I have to say it feels like a massive step backwards to me.<p>Fans will of course tell me that I am not the target audience given that I highly value these aspects, but I still have to wonder who is (good internet, short distance to data centers, at the same time not owning consoles or a PC).<p>Many people worldwide do not have the luxury of access to fast internet.
I'm biased, as a fan of stadia, but I don't think Google will kill Stadia, at least not soon.<p>They're closing their game studios, which so far have produced nothing anyway. As a platform to play games, it's basically faultless. Consolodating the product to play AAA games without having a buy a console seems like a solid move.<p>I might be wrong. Google might do a Google and shutter it though.
I've used Stadia on a 150ish Mb connection and it runs as fast as the game does locally.
I multiplay borderlands 3 with friends and very rarely have issues.<p>If there's speed issues, what Stadia seems to do is lower the resolution being transmitted, in order to maintain speed and low latency.<p>So the worst is some very rare periods of minor lower resolution adjustment for a few seconds then it turns back to normal. It's a blip.<p>It's never been an issue for me.<p>I love seeing Cyberpunk in max resolution on my 5 year old macbook or playing windows only games on Chrome in Linux.
I want to know when google is going to kill GCP, cuz they lose $5.6B on $13B in revenue. Is alphabet going to give it the axe in 2023 like was leaked? <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/lb7j6c/alphabet_beats_expectations_but_gcp_a_loss_leader/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/lb7j6c/alphabet_bea...</a>
The problem I have with Stadia is the target audience.<p>People who want to play AAA games, and<p>People who don’t care about latency, and<p>People who don’t want a console.<p>Honestly, who is this for? If you can’t afford a console there are options such as “Xbox All Access” which starts as low as $23/month. If you want to play AAA games and don’t want a console, you probably care about latency.<p>I just don’t get it.
I've never used Stadia, but I have used xCloud and I can say that the experience is great, for some genres. Game streaming works really well for slower games, like dungeon crawlers and rpgs. for these games, it's 100% playable and is great on the train. There's some other games, like PUBG and forza, that just really don't make sense with the latency (This is on my cable nbn, I get roughly 7ms ping)
Stadia’s terribly laggy. Also hardware is cheap, why wouldn’t I just run it all myself? Just yet another attempt to get people renting instead of owning.