When Google launched its cloud gaming service, Stadia, in November 2019, we were impressed by the concept but the execution was lacking. Nearly a year and a half after its debut, Stadia slowly acquired the features that Google originally boasted about, bringing it closer to the service it could. Stages are not nearly perfect, and Google still has a bit of work to do, but it’s a much better service today than with the launch.
The news that Google has decided to business of making original games for Stadia has asked some to ask if the service is long for this world. Therefore, we decided to reevaluate Stadia to see if it has a future. Obviously, we do not have a crystal ball, but after digging deep to see what progress Google has made since the launch of Stadiums, we still think it has potential – if Google does not give it up completely .
Over the past year and a half, Google has gradually 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 controller wirelessly with your computer. The controller itself can connect to wifi and bluetooth, so it did not make much sense not to offer a wireless option at launch if you could connect the controller wirelessly to a Chromecast. However, that has changed.
Stadia added the wireless capability to the computer last May, and while it’s a big improvement, I’ll admit that the controller had a problem connecting to my computer. I found that it automatically connected to my Chromecast and disconnected it manually, but I was still having trouble connecting it to my computer. This seems to be a common problem, because a quick search found a solution: Chrome is used in Windows 7 compatibility mode. This is an easy solution to an annoying bug.
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Google recently added State Share which, with the launch of Hitman 3 last month on the platform. The new feature allows a player to create a link to a specific point in his game that he can share with other Stadia players. Those players can then click on the link and they will be taken to exactly the same point in the game, with the same health stats and inventory items, and try to play the same part of the game. Developers will have to add this feature to their games, and there’s no telling how much it will do – but it’s neat.
Another welcome addition to Stadia is Crowd Choice, which was eventually introduced to users with the release of Baldur’s Gate 3 last October. When enabled, streamers can give their viewers the option to vote for what choice they should make in the game. The option that receives the most votes will appear in the live stream of the game. This feature is now also available in Death by daily, and it’s a very easy way to get more interaction with viewers.
Live streaming to YouTube was launched last December, just in time for Cyberpunk 2077’s introduction. Next to Twitch, YouTube is probably the next biggest platform for streamers, and a built-in feature to stream directly from Stadia to YouTube should have been a nice feature for some streamers. I’m not a pro, but I do occasionally stream to my friends on Twitch, and I never really liked messing with XSplit. Direct streaming is much more convenient.
With the completion of the list of unique Stadia features that Google first announced in March 2019, Crowd Play finally made its debut in December last year in games such as Mortal Kombat 11, Borderlands 3, Death by daily, and a few others. If someone streams one of these games, they can invite their viewers to play with them on Stadiums. Of course, it’s a collaborative and multiplayer feature, so it’s logical why the above games were the first to get it.
It is very! Do you need a break? A little water? N happie? Caffeine? That’s just half of the changes Google has made to Stadia over the past year.
Many of the big names and indie titles have been added to Stadia since its inception –Cyberpunk 2077, Hitman 3, Borderlands 3 and Baldur’s Gate 3 is the most important. But quarantine has led me and my partner to look for more cooperative games to play together, or puzzle games for singles that we can still play. I have to hand it over to Stadia to introduce me to some games that were released a few years ago but that flew under my radar, like The gardens between, a beautiful but heartbreaking puzzle game about two best friends and neighbors who recall their memories of all their backyard adventures, just before … well, I will not spoil it. The Turing Test and Jotun are some other examples of games on Stadium that we enjoyed.
Stadiums, however, definitely need more recent titles. This may seem problematic Google closed its internal game studio, but the company has already drawn up transactions with other studios, including Super Massive Games (the masterminds behind Until dawn and The Dark Pictures Anthology) to create fresh content for his library. With the platform, players can now go to their Ubisoft + Account, just like Amazon’s Luna, but users will of course need an active Ubisoft subscription. However, Stadia has a free level, so you do not have to pay for two game subscriptions. The company plans to open up its streaming technology to other game publishers, so we hope to see more exclusives or releases launched alongside other platform launches in the coming year.
Having enough bandwidth to play the games is another story. A game like The gardens between does not need much bandwidth just because it is graphically designed. It will work at 15 Mbps at 1080p on a computer, which is slightly higher than Stadia’s minimum download speed. A game like Cyberpunk 2077, which is incredibly demanding, requires more than 100 Mbps at 1080p to function without any pixelation, rubber band or input. The game cannot be played differently. However, this is a problem with cloud games in general, and since Stadia’s release, not much has changed at the front.
One of the most important aspects of Stadiums is still how games are organized in your library. When you look at your library on your phone, it’s not that bad – there’s a menu that lets you organize games by recent games or alphabetically, and you can scroll through two columns of games at once. But on the computer and your TV, it’s unnecessarily cumbersome, and the TV is the worse of the two.
On a computer, you can see a 3×3 roster of your games, but the order in which they are organized is a combination of your most recent games and games recently added to your library. There is no option to alphabetize it, which makes it difficult to find a game that you have not played in a while or that you bought. Not only do the same strange organizational rules apply on TV, but your library is arranged in one row through which you have to browse until you find the game you want. If you scroll too fast, the system will skip a few screenshots of the game every now and then. There really needs to be a uniform way to organize your game library on all platforms for Stadiums.
I also wish I could buy games directly from Stadia via my TV instead of picking up my phone or going to my computer to buy a game from there. You can do this with Xbox and PlayStation, and it seems to me bananas that any platform with a console-like setup will not have the same functionality. Of course, it’s not hard to turn off the controller and pick up my phone, but I’m going to be picky about this unnecessary step. I have the controller in my hand. Blades only at the game store!
However, stadiums have greatly improved the way they manage screenshots. When the platform was first launched, you could take it with the screenshot button on the controller, but you could only see it on your phone and there was no way to share it. Now you can view it on your computer and the app on your phone, share screenshots and share shares with a link, and video clips will now contain voices when you save a track when you’re in a game chat or streaming live on YouTube. You can also download screenshots and tracks from Stadia to your local computer, but you can not do the same on mobile devices.
And I can not forget that iOS users can play now Stadium games in Apple’s Safari Browser as a result last December. Because of Apple’s strict App Store policy on cloud gaming platformsGoogle has never been able to get iPhone and iPad users to play games in the Stadia app in the App Store. But cloud games via WebRTC implementation, this is how GeForce Now users can play on Chromebooks, is completely good.
Oh, and if you have a 4K monitor, you can play games in 4K on your computer if you have a Pro subscription – and Family Share is now something, so you can add people to your family group and they can any of the games you own on your account. You also do not need an active Stadia Pro account to share games or play shared games.
Phew, OK. It was a lot. And most of it is good.
The only thing Stadia is currently holding back is a lack of recently released games and games that support its unique state share and multitude of choice features. It’s not a small hurdle to make clear to make Stadiums more attractive to players, not to mention the bandwidth limit that is always a problem with cloud play services overall until we actually try to close the digital divide in the US, but I deviate. Stages have made measurable progress over the past year. The service just needs to gain momentum again – if Google is committed to it.