When Google launched its cloud gaming service, Stadia, in November 2019, we were already impressed by the concept but execution was lacking. Nearly a year and a half after its debut, Stadia has been gradually gaining the functions that Google initially boasted, bringing it closer to the service that has the potential to be. Stadia isn’t nearly perfect and Google still has a bit of work to do, but today it’s a much better service than it was at launch.
The news that Google decided to leave business of making original games as Stadia caused some to question whether the service is long for this world. So we decided to re-evaluate Stadia to see if it has a future. Obviously, we don’t have a glass ball, but after taking a deep dive to see what progress Google has made since the launch of Stadia, we still think it has potential, if Google doesn’t give it up altogether.
For the last year and a half, Google has constantly improved Stadia with features that make the service more fun and much easier to use. One of the most “omg finally” additions to the Stadia platform was the ability to use the Stadia wireless driver with your PC. The controller itself can be connected to wifi and Bluetooth, so it didn’t make much sense not to offer any wireless option at launch when the wireless controller could be connected to a Chromecast. That, however, has changed.
Stadia added wireless capability to the PC last May and while this is a big improvement, I will admit that the driver connecting to my PC has been a problem. I found out that it automatically linked to my Chromecast and I unplugged it manually, but I still had trouble connecting it to my PC. Apparently, this is a common problem, because a quick search gave a solution: run Chrome in Windows 7 compatibility mode. It’s an easy solution to an annoying bug.
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Google recently added State Share, with the launch of Hitman 3 last month on the platform. Basically, the new feature allows the player to create a link to a specific point in their game that they can share with other Stadia players. These players can click on the link and will be taken to the same point in the game, with all the same health stats and inventory items, and will try to play in the same part of the game. Developers will have to add this feature to their games, and it is not known how many will do it, but it is very correct.
Another welcome addition to Stadia is Crowd Choice, which was finally released to users with the release of Baldur’s Gate 3 last October. When activated, streamers can give their viewers the option to vote on which option they should make in the game. The option that gets the most votes will be shown in the live play of the game. This feature is now also available in Death in the light of day, and is a very smart way to create more interaction with viewers.
The live stream to YouTube was launched last December, just in time Cyberpunk 2077 launch. Along with Twitch, YouTube is probably the next largest platform for streamers, and having a built-in feature to stream directly from Stadia to YouTube should have been a good feature for some streamers. I’m not a professional, but from time to time I stream to my Twitch friends and I’ve never really enjoyed messing with XSplit. Direct transmission is much more convenient.
Completing the list of exclusive Stadia features that Google first announced in March 2019, Crowd Play finally debuted last December in games like Mortal Kombat 11, Border lands 3, Death in the light of day, and a few more. If anyone is streaming any of these games, you can invite your viewers to play with them on Stadia. Of course, this is a cooperative, multiplayer feature, so it makes sense why previous games were the first to achieve this.
That’s a lot! Do you need a break? A little water? Something to bite? Caffeine? That’s only half of the changes Google has made to Stadia in the last year.
Lots of big name and independent titles added to Stadia since it debuted …Cyberpunk 2077, Hitman 3, Borderlands 3 and Baldur’s Gate 3 they are the most prominent. But quarantine has led my partner and I to look for more cooperative games to play together or single player puzzle games that we can still play together. I have to hand it over to Stadia to introduce me to some games that were released a few years ago and that flew under my radar, like The gardens between, a lovely but heartbreaking puzzle game about two best friends and neighbors who remember all their adventures in the garden just before … well, I won’t spoil it. The Turing test i Jotun these are just a few more examples of games at Stadia that we have been enjoying.
Still, Stadia definitely needs more recent titles. It might seem problematic that Google closed its internal gaming studio, but the company has already established agreements with other studios, including Supermassive games (the brain behind Until dawn i The anthology of dark images) to create new content for your library. The platform now allows players to link to theirs Ubisoft + account, just like Amazon’s Luna, but of course users will need an active Ubisoft subscription. Still, Stadia has a free level, so you won’t have to pay for two game subscriptions. The company plans to open its streaming technology to other game publishers, so we expect to see more exclusive or timed versions along with other platform releases next year.
Having enough bandwidth to play games is a different story. A game like The gardens between it doesn’t need a lot of bandwidth just for its graphic design. It will run at 15 Mbps at 1080p on your computer, which is a bit higher than Stadia’s minimum download speed. A game like Ciberpunk 2077, which is incredibly demanding, needs more than 100 Mbps at 1080p to run without any pixelation, elastic band or input delay. Otherwise, the game cannot be played. This is a problem with cloud gaming in general, but it hasn’t changed much on this front since the launch of Stadia.
My main drawback with Stadia is still how games are organized in your library. If you look at your library on your phone, it’s not that bad: there’s a drop-down menu that lets you organize games by recent or alphabetical games, and you can scroll through two columns of games at once. But on the PC and TV it is unnecessary as the TV is the worse of the two.
On your computer, you can see a 3×3 grid of your games, but the order in which they are organized is a combination of your most recently played games and the games you recently added to your library. There’s no option to alphabetize them, which makes it hard to find a game you haven’t played in a while or bought in a while ago. On TV, not only do the same weird organizational rules apply, but your library is organized in a single row that you have to scroll through until you find the game you want. If you scroll too fast, the system will occasionally skip some thumbnails of game images. Really, there needs to be a uniform way to organize your game library across all Stadia platforms.
I would also like to be able to buy games directly from Stadia via TV instead of having to pick up the phone or go to the PC to buy a game from there. You can do this with Xbox and PlayStation, and it seems to me banana that any platform with a console-like configuration would not have the same function. Of course, it’s not hard to stop lowering the driver and grabbing the phone, but I’ll be picky with this unnecessary step. I have the controller in my hand. Just visit me at the game store!
Stadia, however, greatly improved the way it handles screenshots. When the platform was first launched, you could grab them with the controller screenshot button, but you could only view them on your phone and there was no way to share them. You can now view them on your PC and phone app, share screenshots, and share status with a link, and video clips will now include voices if you save a clip when you’re in the game chat or live streaming directly on YouTube. You can also download screenshots and clips of Stadia to your local PC, but you can’t do the same on your mobile.
And I can’t forget that iOS users can now play Stadia games on Apple Safari browser from now on last December. Because of Apple strict App Store policies on cloud gaming platformsGoogle was never able to allow iPhone and iPad users to play games on the Stadia app in the App Store. But the game in the cloud by implementing WebRTC, which is like GeForce Now users can play Chromebooks, is totally fine.
Oh, and if you have a 4K monitor, you can play 4K games on your PC if you have a Pro subscription, and Family Share is one thing, so you can add people to your family group and they can play any games that you have in your account. You also don’t need an active Stadia Pro account to share games or play games.
Ugh, okay. It was a lot. And most are good.
The only thing stopping Stadia right now is the lack of games and recently released games that support its exclusive state and crowd participation features. These are no small obstacles to remove to make Stadia more attractive to players, not to mention the bandwidth limitation which will always be a problem with the cloud games services in general until we really try to close the digital divide in the US. Stadia has made measurable progress in the last year. The service only needs to regain some momentum, if Google is committed to it.