When Google launched its cloud gaming service, Stadia, in November 2019, I was impressed with the concept but the execution was missing. Almost a year and a half after its debut, Stadia slowly gained the functions that Google initially boasted about, bringing it closer to the service it has. The stage is far from perfect, and Google still has something to do, but it’s a much better service today than it was at launch.
The news that Google has decided to get out of the business of making original games for the Stage has led some to wonder whether the service is long for this world. So we decided to reevaluate the Stadium to see if it had a future. Obviously, we don’t have a crystal ball, but after we dive in to see what progress Google has made since launching Stage, we still believe it has potential – if Google doesn’t give it up altogether.
In the last year and a half, Google is constantly improving Stage with features that make the service more fun and much easier to use. One of the most “finally added” to the Stadia platform was the ability to use the Stadia wireless controller with your computer. The controller itself can connect to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, so it didn’t make much sense not to offer a wireless option at launch when you could connect the wireless controller to a Chromecast. However, that has changed.
The stadium added wireless capability to the PC in May last year, and while this is a big improvement, I admit it was a problem connecting the controller to my computer. I realized that it automatically connects to my Chromecast and I disconnected it manually, but I still had problems connecting to the computer. This seems to be a common problem, because a quick search found a solution: running Chrome in Windows 7 compatibility mode. It’s an easy solution to an annoying error.
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Google recently added State Share, timed with launch Hitman 3 last month on the platform. Basically, the new feature allows a player to create a link to a certain point in his game that he can share with other Stadia players. These players can then click on the link and be led to exactly the same point in the game, with the same health stats and inventory items, and can 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 they want, but it is neat.
Another welcome addition to the Stage is Crowd Choice, which was eventually released to users upon launch. Baldur’s Gate 3 last October. When enabled, streamers can give viewers the option to vote on 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 Dead in the light of day, and is a very ingenious way to create more interaction with viewers.
Live streaming on YouTube was released in December last year, on 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 Stage to YouTube should have been a nice feature for some streamers. I’m not a professional, but I occasionally pass it on to my friends on Twitch, and I’ve never really enjoyed playing with XSplit. Direct transmission is much more convenient.
Completing the list of unique Stage features that Google first announced in March 2019, Crowd Play made its debut in December last year in games such as Mortal Kombat 11, Border countries 3, Dead in the light of day, and a few others. If someone streams any of these games, they can invite their spectators to play with them on the Stadium. Of course, this is a cooperative and multi-player feature, so it makes sense why the above games were the first to get it.
That’s a lot! I need a break? Any water? A snack? Caffeine? This is only half of the changes Google has made to Stage in the last year.
Lots of great indie titles added to the Stage since it debuted –Cyberpunk 2077, Hitman 3, Borderlands 3 and Baldur’s Gate 3 are the most notable. But quarantine has led me and my partner to look for more cooperative games to play together or single player puzzle games that we can still play together. We have to hand it over to Stadia because he showed me some games that were released a few years ago, but that flew under my radar, like The gardens between, a beautiful but insane puzzle game about two best friends and neighbors who remember all their backyard adventures right before … well, I won’t spoil it. The Turing test and Jotun these are just a few other examples of games on the Stage that we enjoyed.
However, the Stadium certainly needs more recent titles. It might seem problematic that Google has closed its internal gaming studio, but the company has already established deals with other studios, including Super massive games (back brains Until dawn and Anthology Dark Pictures) to create fresh content for his library. The platform now allows players to connect to Ubisoft + account, just like Amazon Moon, but of course users will need an active Ubisoft subscription. The stadium has a free level, though, so you won’t have to pay for two game subscriptions. The company plans to open its streaming technology to other game publishers, so hopefully we’ll see more exclusives or timed releases along with other platform releases next year.
Having enough bandwidth to play the games is a different story. A game like that The gardens between it doesn’t need a lot of bandwidth just because of the way it’s designed graphically. It will work at 15 Mbps at 1080p on PC very well, which is slightly higher than the minimum download speed of the Stage. A game like that 2077. Cyberpunk, which is incredibly demanding, needs more than 100 Mbps at 1080p to run without any pixelation, rubber band or input delay. Otherwise, the game cannot be played. However, this is a problem with cloud games in general and not much has changed on this front since the launch of Stadia.
My only major pain with Stage 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 run two columns of games at a time. But on your PC and TV, it’s unnecessarily laborious, the TV being 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 the most recently played games and the most recently added to your library. There is no literacy option for them. it’s hard to find a game you haven’t played in a while or bought some time ago. On TV, not only do the same weird organizational rules apply, but your library is arranged in a single row that you have to scroll through until you find the game you want. If you scroll too fast, then the system will skip a few thumbnails of the game from time to time. There really must be a uniform way to organize your game library on all platforms for the Stage.
I would also like to be able to buy games directly from Stadia via my TV instead of having to pick up my phone or go to my PC to buy a game from there. You can do this with Xbox and PlayStation and it seems to me that any platform with a console-like configuration would not have the same function. Sure, it’s not hard to set up the controller and pick up my phone, but I’ll be picky about this useless step. I have the controller in my hand. Just go into the game store!
However, Stadia has greatly improved the way it handles screenshots. When the platform was first launched, you could take them with the screen capture button on the controller, but you could only view them on your phone and there was no way to share them. You can now view them on your computer and the app on your phone, share screenshots and share status with a link, and videos will now include voices if you save a clip when you’re in a game chat or live on YouTube. You can also download screenshots and clips from the Stage to your local computer, but you can’t do the same on your mobile.
And I can’t forget that iOS users can play now Stage Games in Apple Browser Safari starting with this last December. Because of Apple strict App Store policies on cloud gaming platforms, Google has never been able to allow iPhone and iPad users to play games in the Stage app in the App Store. But cloud games through the implementation of WebRTC, so be it GeForce Now users can play on Chromebooks, is completely fine.
Oh, and if you have a 4K monitor, you can play 4K games on your computer if you have a Pro subscription – and Family Share is one thing now, so you can add people to your family group and play any of them. the games you have in your account You don’t need an active Stage Pro account to share games or play shared games.
Phew, OK. It was a lot. And most of it is good.
The only thing that is stopping the Stadium at the moment is the lack of recently released games and games that support its unique state sharing and crowd selection functions. These are no small obstacles to remove to make the Stage more attractive to players, not to mention the bandwidth limitation that will always be a cloud problem gambling services in general, until we actually try to close the digital divide in the US. But I deviate. The stadium has made measurable progress over the past year. The service only needs to regain some momentum – if Google is committed to it.