As Google unveiled Stadia yesterday — its upcoming streaming platform for video games, development, and all-round future of how we develop and play games on the whole — it certainly looked like the future of the industry.
Problem was, three massive questions were left unanswered, essentially leaving Google’s hopes of conquering the video games market once and for all up in the air.
Question 1: What’s Google Stadia Going to Cost?
Probably the first question on everyone’s lips as they begin to learn more about Google’s vision for the future of how you play games, is just how much is it going to cost?
This isn’t a physical piece of hardware you have to purchase every five or six years to keep up with the latest technology and play the newest games.
This is something accessible from pretty much any screen you already have, and will, seemingly be made more powerful as demands from developers and consumers for more processing power arise.
By assuming the responsibility of providing the sheer processing power to run games at 4K 60fps (and 8K in the future, apparently) in thousands, potentially millions of instances at any given time, there’s got to be a huge amount of power in Google’s data centers.
Not to mention the infrastructure in place to make streaming such insane amounts of data with little to no latency is going to cost a pretty penny to set up, let alone maintain.
Then you’ve got the added factors of the library of games available on the service. Google’s going to need to recoup some of that cash they’re paying developers and publishers to make their games available via Stadia.
While Google Stadia truly looked the vision of the future of video games, the big, fat, question mark over how much it’s going to cost has me pumping the brakes on the hype train, hard.
Google Stadia needs to hit the perfect price point if it wants to be considered a viable option against the current landscape of hardware platforms. But there are so many different pricing models and options Google could opt for, and so many unknown variables that could factor into that price, it becomes impossible to gauge this viability.
If you ask us, a subscription model with annual fees similar to that of Netflix or EA Access would probably be a perfect sweet spot. Is that realistic? Who knows, but if any company can risk taking the loss leader to get players into its ecosystem, its Google.
Question 2: How Realistic is HQ Streaming for the Masses?
During its conference, Google showed off how seamless it was to switch between devices and continue playing Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey right from the point they left off at via Stadia.
In the space of about a minute, a demonstration showed Odyssey running on a Pixelbook, smartphone, tablet and a TV via a Chromecast dongle.
Each time they switched tech, it was a matter of seconds before the game was running all slick with, apparently, little to no latency.
The question, of course, arises, just how many people’s internet can realistically stream that kind of quality content in such a seamless manner?
Well, that was another question that Google did its best to avoid during the presentation, but has since commented on in an interview with Kotaku.
According to Google Stadia boss Phil Harrison, when testing Project Stream towards the end of last year “to get 1080p, 60 frames per second, required approximately 25 megabits per second. In fact, we use less than that, but that’s where we put our recommended limit at.”
Discussing 4K requirements, Harrison went on to state, “But with innovations that we’ve made on the streamer side and on the compression side since then, when we launch, we will be able to get to 4K but only raise that bandwidth to about 30 megabits per second.”
All of this will apparently scale judging by the quality and speed of your internet connection. The question remains whether or not latency will become significantly more noticeable when playing on connections with less bandwidth, on top of the reductions to image quality and framerate.
On the surface, this actually sounds pretty great, but I’m more interested to see just how Stadia performs out in the real world. In real peoples’ homes and via their routers, not through a fairly controlled environment at a press event.
If the reality of the matter is that only those with superfast fiber connections can get a gaming experience similar to what they’d get on the Xbox One X, PS4 Pro, or via traditional PC gaming, Stadia may struggle to find its feet.
Again, though, if there’s any company that has the technical know-how and clout to make something like this work, it’s probably Google.
Question 3: Does It Have Any Noteworthy Exclusives?
There were a ton of cool features of Stadia that Google showed off during its conference. State Share allows content creators to share a link and have other players continue from that very moment, perhaps to try and beat a high score or burning lap.
In another example, Jade Redmond showed off how it was easy for developers to switch up the art style of their game in real-time thanks to Style Transfer machine learning.
Another showed multiple viewpoints of the same game environment and how players could dive in quickly to help their friend before hopping out.
They also showed how Google Assistant could be used to pull up a video walkthrough from YouTube, skip to the exact place you’re at within the game, and help you advance with pretty much no effort whatsoever.
This was all very impressive, but unless Google Stadia can nab itself some major exclusive titles, there’s little impetus to jump from say the Xbox or PlayStation ecosystems over to this right now. For years, who has the “best exclusives” has long been a point of contention among fans of the big three.
Where Sony has strived this generation to bring plenty of blockbuster titles to the PS4 each year, Microsoft has stumbled in that regard tis generation, with many blaming the Xbox One’s less impressive sales performance (in comparison to the PS4, at least) on a lack of exclusive software.
Aside from a few tech-demo-looking titles and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey & Tomb Raider, we don’t know what games will be available on Google Stadia. Let alone if it will have any major exclusive titles to begin with.
Considering the sheer scale, scope, and power on offer with Google Stadia, I’m sure the platform will entice some developers to try things they never dreamed possible on conventional video game platforms. Whether or not they generate enough hype to make Stadia a serious contender, though, remains to be seen.
