Google shouldn’t give up on Stadia now that things are going well

When Google launched its cloud gaming service, Stadia, in November 2019, we were impressed with the concept but the execution was lacking. Almost a year and a half after its debut, Stadia has gradually acquired the features that Google initially boasted about, bringing it closer to the service it has the potential to be. Stadia is far from perfect and Google still has some work 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 original game creation company for Stadia has made some wonder if 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 crystal ball, but after taking a deep dive to see the progress Google has made since the launch of Stadia, we still think it has potential, if Google doesn’t give it up entirely. .

For a year and a half, Google has steadily improved Stadia with features that make the service more fun and much easier to use. One of the more “omg finally” additions to the Stadia platform was the ability to use the Stadia Controller wirelessly with your PC. The controller itself can connect to wifi and bluetooth, so it didn’t make much sense not to offer a wireless option at launch when you could connect the controller wirelessly to a Chromecast. This has changed, however.

Stadia added wireless capability to the PC last May, and while this is a big improvement, I admit connecting the controller to my PC was a problem. I discovered that it automatically connects to my Chromecast and unpaired it manually, but still had issues connecting it to my PC. Apparently, this is a common problem, as a quick search found a solution: running Chrome in Windows 7 compatibility mode. It’s a simple fix for an annoying bug.

Google recently added Timed State Share with the launch of Hitman 3 last month on the platform. Basically, the new feature allows a player to link to a specific point in their game that they can share with other Stadia players. These players can then click on the link and they will be taken to the exact same point in the game, with the same health stats and same inventory items, and try to play in the same part of the game. Developers will need to add this functionality to their games, and it’s unclear how many will, but that’s fine.

Another welcome addition to Stadia is Crowd Choice, which was finally rolled out to users with the release of Baldur Gate 3 last October. When enabled, streamers can give their viewers the option to vote for the 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 the light of day, and it’s a really nifty way to create more interaction with viewers.

Direct streaming to YouTube launched last December, just in time for Cyberpunk 2077 launch. Next to Twitch, YouTube is arguably the second largest platform for streamers, and having a built-in feature to stream directly from Stadia to YouTube must have been a nice feature for some streamers. I’m not a pro, but I do occasionally stream for my friends on Twitch, and I’ve never really enjoyed playing with XSplit. Direct streaming is much more convenient.

To round out the list of unique Stadia features that Google first announced in March 2019, Crowd Play finally debuted last December in games like Mortal Kombat 11, Borderlands 3, Death by the light of day, and a few others. If someone is streaming any of these games, they can invite their viewers to play with them on Stadia. Of course, this is a cooperative and multiplayer feature, so it makes sense that the games above were the first to get it.

It’s a lot! Need a break? Some water? A snack? Caffeine? That’s only half of the changes Google made to Stadia over the past year.

Many big-name and independent titles have been added to Stadia since its inception –Cyberpunk 2077, Hitman 3, Borderlands 3 and Baldur’s Gate 3 are the most notable. But the 40s led my partner and I to look for more cooperative games to play together, or one-player puzzle games that we can still play together. I have to hand it over to Stadia for showing me a few games that came out several years ago but have flown under my radar, like The gardens between, a beautiful but heartbreaking puzzle game about two best friends and neighbors who recollect all their adventures in the backyard right before … well, I won’t spoil it. The Turing test and Jotun are just a few more examples of games on Stadia that we love.

However, Stadia definitely needs more recent titles. It may seem problematic that Google has closed its internal game studio, but the company has already made deals with other studios, including Supermassive games (the brains behind Until dawn and Anthology of Dark Images) to create new content for its library. The platform now allows players to connect to their Ubisoft + Account, just like Amazon’s Luna, but of course users will need an active Ubisoft subscription. However, Stadia does offer a free tier, so you won’t need to pay for two game subscriptions. The company plans to open up its streaming technology to other game publishers, so hopefully we’ll see more of it. exclusives or scheduled releases alongside the launches of other platforms next year.

Having enough bandwidth to play games is another story. A game like The gardens between doesn’t need a lot of bandwidth just because of its graphic design. It will run great on 15Mbps at 1080p on PC, which is a bit higher than Stadia’s minimum download speed. A game like Cyberpunk 2077, which is incredibly demanding, needs over 100 Mbps at 1080p to operate without pixelation, rubber band, or input delay. Otherwise, the game is unplayable. This is an issue with cloud gaming in general, and not much has changed on this front since the release of Stadia.

My only major issue with Stadia is still the way the games in your library are organized. If you’re looking at your library on your phone, it’s not that bad – there’s a drop-down menu that lets you organize recently played games or alphabetically, and you can scroll through two columns of games at once. But on PC and on your TV it’s needlessly laborious, the TV being the worse of the two.

On PC, you can see a 3×3 grid of your games, but the order they are arranged is a combination of your most recently played games and the games most recently added to your library. There is no option to sort them alphabetically, which makes it difficult to find a game that you haven’t played in a while or bought a long time ago. On TV, not only do the same weird organization rules apply, but your library is organized in a single row that you have to scroll down until you find the game you want. If you scroll too fast, the system will occasionally skip a few game image thumbnails. There really has to be a consistent way to organize your game library across all platforms for Stadia.

I would also like to be able to buy games directly from Stadia through my TV instead of having to pick up my phone or go to my PC to buy a game from there. You can do that with both Xbox and PlayStation, and it seems like a banana to me that any platform with a console-like setup would not have the same function. Of course, it’s not difficult to adjust 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. Just leave me at the play store!

However, Stadia has significantly improved the handling of screenshots. When the platform was first launched, you could take them with the screenshot button on the controller, but you could only see them on your phone and there was no way to share them. You can now view them on PC and the app on your phone, share screenshots and status shares with a link, and video clips will now include voices if you record a clip while chatting. game or live on YouTube. You can also download screenshots and clips from Stadia to your local PC, but you can’t do the same on mobile.

And I can’t forget that iOS users can now play Stadia games at Apple Safari browser Starting from past 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 on the Stadia app in the App Store. But cloud gaming via the WebRTC implementation is like this GeForce Now users can play on Chromebooks, is quite good.

Oh, and if you have a 4K monitor, you can play games in 4K on your PC if you have a Pro subscription – and Family Sharing is a thing now, so you can add people to your family group and they can. play any of the games you own on your account. You also don’t need an active Stadia Pro account to share games or play shared games.

Phew, OK. It was a lot. And most are good.

The only thing holding Stadia back at the moment is the lack of recently released games and games that support its unique state-sharing and crowd-picking features. These aren’t small hurdles to jump over to make Stadia more appealing to gamers, not to mention the bandwidth limitation that will always be a problem. problem with the cloud the game services overall until we try to bridge the digital divide in the United States. Stadia made measurable progress over the past year. The service just needs to get back on track, if Google commits to it.