Curious Case of Stadia

Yesterday afternoon was the unofficial kickoff of E3 Season, and it started with one of the more bizarre product offerings. For some time we have known that Google was making a large push into gaming with its Stadia product that serves to offer console gaming without a console. Now if this sounds familiar… it is because we have seen this same basic idea numerous times. Just off the top of my head I remember OnLive, Gaikai, Playstation Now and Geforce Now to name a few but I am certain I left off a half dozen of these product offerings. Where they have all fallen short however is in control latency and the amount of bandwidth required to create a playable experience.

Google however thinks it understands exactly how much bandwidth is required to be able to use their product and has produced a handy chart to show what level of gaming will be available and what level of bandwidth. The challenge unfortunately is a little bit more nuanced given that the total bandwidth picture is influenced by the hardware sitting between your device and your internet service provider. I’ve gone to a lot of effort to try and make sure I have more than enough bandwidth to do whatever it is that I want to do online… and I feel like I would probably fall short of what would be required to make 4K gaming on this device stable.

I have what I feel like is better than average internet for the United States. Additionally I have as much as I possibly can connected directly to a Gigabit switch attached hanging off of my AC 5400 router with two separate 5 ghz wireless bands theoretically capable of 2167 Mbps. I’ve segregated a business network and a gaming network all in an attempt to cut down on chatter. In addition to this I have 2 other AC 5400 repeaters helping to form a mesh network around the house. I use Parsec on a nightly basis and with a wired connection 4K streaming from my machine upstairs does not really work well enough to be something I would want to do on a regular basis. Similarly with all of this, none of the 4K video streaming options really feel viable and I always end up downgrading them to 1080p. Basically what I am saying is out of personal experience… their estimates are nonsense and will not produce the sort of results that they think they will.

What Google Stadia is really selling is a vision that I have long sought out myself. The ability to play the same games from any device in the house at any time I would like. In essence this is why I use Parsec, because it allows me to extend my more expensive and capable gaming desktop experience to my less than capable and aging gaming laptop. Even then however the experience works equally well when playing over my Chromebook via the native Android Parsec app, so I can see at least in theory that the vision of Stadia is possible based on my own experiences. I just question if we are at a point bandwidth wise where this level of fidelity is really ready for prime time consumption. Especially once you consider another potential monkey wrench… I am not really the target audience for this device.

That is ultimately the piece we are going to have to factor into our decisions about Stadia is the fact that most of us reading this blog are not what I feel like is actually the market for a device like this. For me personally… I own a 4k capable gaming desktop, an aging but still viable gaming laptop, effectively every console from this current generation and every console from the last generation. I’ve spent the money on hardware and accouterments required to be able to play games at a reasonable level of fidelity and with it comes a large library of games that I already own. Stadia more or less is going to require us to buy into a completely different library of games and potentially deliver a noticeable worse experience than being connected real time to hardware. Sure there will be the bleeding edge early adopters among us that dabble with this… but ultimately I expect we will all return to our comfortable world of hardware based gaming within the week.

I feel the true market for this device is the cord cutter that has already tuned their network and devices to fit a steady diet of media streaming from various platforms. The target individual maybe was a serious gamer in their youth but as life got busy they realized there just wasn’t enough time in the day to play these rather expensive consoles that used to just gather dust in their apartment. Every now and then a game comes along that through the Zeitgeist, friends and a dose of FOMO they really wish they could play… but that proposition seems less elegant when you consider playing a single game might have at a minimum a $360 outlay of cash associated with it. If this person could simply buy the game and be able to play it with a second hand direct input controller over their business class laptop… then I think you have the perfect use case for this network. Stadia is a system built for the occasional gamer and is going to be made or broken on expanding the range of gaming behind those of us who are already sworn acolytes.

I think the real tragedy of yesterdays presentation is the fact that they spent exactly zero air time talking about Stadia Base and instead made a hard push for Stadia Pro. The founders edition is $130 and includes 3 months of the $9.99 per month subscription as well as 3 months for a friend. However if you look at these charts what you are essentially getting for your “pro” money is 4k gaming and I have already stated that I think this is a pipe dream unless you happen to have Gigabit internet. What is way more impressive is the fact that they give you 1080p 60 fps stereo gaming without a reoccurring subscription and the ability to dip your toes into all of the free to play content that is going to be on the platform like Elder Scrolls Online and the recently announced as free Destiny 2 New Light.

This is going to be the real backbone of the player base… folks that purchased a single game or want to try out one of the free to play offerings. Maybe these are folks that are already mobile gamers but crave something more immersive, or maybe they just want to occasionally relive the nostalgia of their youth that their jobs keep them from on a regular basis. In those scenarios I think this platform makes a lot of sense. I do however think that “Netflix for Games” is probably a really bad way to look at this service, and I feel like the as of yet officially announced XCloud is going to be more of that since the Xbox Game Pass already does an amazing job of serving up a ton of games for the subscription fee. Ultimately at the end of the day… what makes Stadia so confusing is that the messaging seems to be targeting so called “core gamers” when in truth that was likely never their intended audience. Once you keep that in mind… the product makes considerably more sense and may just bring a brand new audience to gaming.