Google Stadia is Free But It's Still A Ripoff
Last month in a promotion, Google gave anyone with a YouTube Premium subscription a Stadia Premiere Edition. The bundle includes a controller, a Chromecast Ultra, and 3 months of Stadia Pro.
Clinging to the decaying corpse of Google Play Music, which entitled me to a YouTube Premium membership, I qualified for it. (That’s corporate synergy, baby.) And I just can’t say no to free shit.
I wanted to know if the game streaming service was really as bad as played-out jokes in comment threads would lead you to believe. After all, I have used Nvidia’s GeForce Now service and came away impressed. Not to mention localized intranet streaming like Playstation’s Remote Play from PS4 to the handheld Vita, and Nvidia and Steam’s streaming options to play games from my PC on my TV. With so many others doing it fairly well, and with Google’s infinite resources, how could Stadia not work?
In short, in lots of ways. Stadia is not good and is not close to a finished product. Even if it worked as intended, Stadia doesn’t make enough sense in its model or pricing structure to justify buying. Or existing. More on that later.
Let’s start with the basics. Google Stadia is meant to be a way to play games using the devices everyone already has rather than needing a dedicated console or a PC equipped with a beefy processor and graphics card. A Stadia Pro subscription allows users to play games at up to 4k resolution at 60 frames per second and 5.1 surround sound.
All you need is the controller and a compatible device. And a really good internet connection. God help you if you have an internet cap or a metered service. Google claims that 4k streaming can eat up as much as 20 gigabytes per hour.
Stadia can be played directly in the Chrome browser. This means that Chromebooks and low powered PCs can theoretically play games in high fidelity. Playing games on the TV is meant to be as easy as casting to the included Chromecast Ultra, the same way you would for the next episode of Queen’s Gambit on Netflix. In reality, things don’t go as smoothly.
Triggering
First off the good: the controller for the most part is solid. With one gigantic drawback. It’s an interesting hybrid of the Playstation Dualshock parallel analog sticks (which I personally prefer) and the Xbox ABXY face button layout. The buttons are clicky and responsive and the sticks feel good with a comfortable concave center, textured rim, and decent range of motion. The d-pad is incredibly clicky, a distinct, more audible click than the face buttons more standard tactile feel. Shoulder buttons are also fine. Overall, with that impression I’d say it’s a good, standard controller.
Except. Good lord the triggers. They offer absolutely no resistance. You lightly touch them and they bottom out, it feels like they forgot to put springs in them. Or tighten the springs at all. They feel awful, especially for shooters. But it’s not like shooters, specifically one MMO-lite shooter, have been a sticking point for Google or anything.
Another annoying thing about the controller and the overall Stadia experience is that every time you want to use the service, you need to reconnect the controller. Every single time. Why doesn’t the controller remember the last device you connected to? I’m not changing IPs or doing anything crazy to trick the WiFi connected Stadia controller, but each time I try to use Stadia, I need to enter in a code to use the damn thing.
It’s the first hassle that starts forming a barrier to entry for what is supposed to be this smooth experience, presumably for people who don’t own game consoles and wouldn’t really understand connecting and reconnecting controllers. I should press the Stadia button and it should work.
My Kingdom For Some Settings
It’s really the Stadia experience encased. It should just work, but it doesn’t. Take this another annoying wrinkle for example. There are pretty much no settings. On the PC Chrome version of Stadia, under “Performance” all you are allowed to change is the very broad resolution settings. So 4k if you have Pro, 1080p, 720p, and that’s it.
Why this doesn’t work is that I have a 4k color-accurate workstation monitor, but it doesn’t have HDR. This means that the colors for games are broken, because Stadia is streaming games in 4k HDR. Everything looks oversaturated and blown out. I can’t turn HDR off, there’s no setting for it. Yes, yes first world problems, I know. But if someone is legitimately paying for this service and is in the same situation, it feels wrong. You can’t use the tier you’re paying for properly.
Here’s the thing. Stadia has HDR settings. Just not on PC! On the mobile version (that I sideloaded to my Nvidia Shield TV) there is a separate toggle for HDR under the same Performance settings banner. The kicker is that on my 4k HDR TV, I can’t turn on HDR. So with Stadia, HDR is broken in a kind of Gift of the Magi way on both of my 4k displays. On the HDR compatible display, HDR won’t turn on. On the HDR incompatible display, HDR is on and won’t turn off.
The Stadia experience is undercooked in this way. Things feel missing from whatever version you’re attempting to use. I claimed new Pro games for December that subscribers are entitled to each month. One of them is Hitman 2. It doesn’t show up in my list of games. If I scroll through the store and find the Hitman 2 listing, it says that I claimed it and can play it.
Why do you need to scroll through the store to find what you’re looking for? There is no search functionality. A GOOGLE product has no search. What? Excuse me? That’s bonkers. Inconceivable.
Don’t worry though. It won’t take you long to scroll through the entire Stadia catalog. There can’t be more than 30 games in total. I haven’t counted but that feels right. There are barely any games. Aside from Ubisoft, major publishers are not rushing to put their games on Stadia. And why should they? This is clearly not the ideal way they would want their games to be seen.
Pixel Counting
Stadia performance is all over the place. I should have the ideal setup for Stadia streaming, with a 100mb up/down fiber optic connection. Both devices I used (my computer and the Nvidia Shield) were using a wired ethernet connection.
Sometimes everything is just fine, the image is clear and it feels as if the game is running natively on the hardware and not being streamed. Other times it will pixelate every few moments.
The picture on my TV almost always looked better, despite both screens being the same resolution. The desktop monitor image always came off looking… cheap? There were more artifacts, it would pixelate much more frequently. And remember, this is on the same exact connection.
I tested Stadia during what I would assume would be non-peak hours (like a weekday afternoon) and also peak hours (8-9pm-ish) and it didn’t seem to make a difference. There was no rhyme or reason for why there would be connection issues that would cause pixelation or buffering. Although it should be noted, I never dropped connection or crashed during a gameplay session, it would just occasionally get so blurry it would be unplayable.
Another frustrating quirk: during an alright session of Destiny 2 on the Shield, where the picture was as perfect as you could hope for, I would get near constant audio dropouts. Every few seconds audio would cutout and it was enough to drive me insane.
The worst part was that I was having a bit of fun as a lapsed Destiny player figuring out how to get back into the game. But the only thought in my head was “I wish I was playing this on literally anything else.” Why put up with audio dropouts and blurry images every few moments when there are nearly a dozen versions of Destiny where that isn’t a problem? In fact during a particularly rough stretch I Googled “Destiny 2 PS5” and sure enough, the next-gen upgrade to the shooter released this week. Stadia is irrelevant.
Stadia Doesn’t Add Up
The economics of Stadia just don’t make sense, especially for the product offered. When you don’t get it in a free promotion, a Stadia Premiere Edition is $100, and Stadia Pro is $10 per month. So a year of Stadia is $200. With that you get a small selection of games, but any other games from the store you want to play you have to purchase, almost all of which are a full retail $59.99.
At that price point, why wouldn’t you just go get a PS4 for a similar cost and not have to worry about any of the drawbacks of a streaming service? You would have access to cheaper physical games and a gigantic library.
Or an Xbox One, also at a similar price! Then throw in Xbox Gamepass, which is a ridiculous value, offering access to a constantly growing catalog of games old and new for the same monthly cost as Stadia Pro and offering substantially more value.
Not to mention Google’s penchant for yanking services at almost any point in their lifespan. What happens to the Stadia games you purchased? Chances are they’re gone. Meanwhile physical discs have some kind of permanence, and the newest consoles both have backwards compatibility with physical and digital games.
There doesn’t seem to be a place for Stadia, not when it doesn’t offer any value to the user over traditional console gaming, and especially not when the service is half-baked at best. As it stands, Google Stadia is an expensive paid-for alpha test that no one should waste their money on, not when there are so many better ways to game now.
