Tuesday saw Google made an ambitious, almost too good to believe announcement about a Stadia, a platform that enables streaming of games with heavy graphics demands on any devices of your choice. All you need is access to the Internet.
The Good Signs
Stadia has had its chance to prove itself by running an "Assassin's Creed Odyssey" demo for a while. What it was able to do looked promising and could even herald a new era of gaming. However, apart from that performance, more details of the new platform have not yet to be revealed, raising a bit of concern among the general mass.
The underlying principle of Stadia is to shift all the responsibility of rendering the game to a data center. When the center is done, the outcome is streamed to the device you choose. It is almost like watching others playing on YouTube, but you get to gain control of what happened. This way of working makes Stadia compatible with anything that has the Chrome browser or even runs on the technology of Chrome.
Stadia will run a loop, which might raise the question of whether there will be some latency in the gameplay. However, in the Assassin's Creed Odyssey demo, lags were non-existing so that it can be partly assuring.
For the current ability of Stadia, it seems like it can handle games like Assassin's Creed with ease, but for more demanding titles like a Twitch-based shooter, it might run into trouble. Michael Higham had the opportunity to play Doom Eternal on Stadia, and he confirmed that latency did happen, which proves that this idea of streaming games might work on some tiles but not all, at least for the time being.
Some expect Google to show off its controller, which makes use of Wifi to prevent lagging but there is no such thing on display, meaning that it was not ready at the time of the demo. In the place of that controller is one made by Logitech and it worked ok.
While a specially-designed controller is about to be revealed, Google still makes sure that its Stadia can work with a wide variety of existing controllers. For example, that of a PlayStation or Xbox can be connected to a computer and be compatible with Stadia too.
So in general, lagging does happen but Google is working to fix it, and it is not some deal breaker. People who have had the chance to try it said that it exceeded their expectation and also looked nice. Last year, Google assembled a group to take part in its Google’s Project Stream beta test and these players got to play Odyssey on Stadia. It is obvious that between that test and this year’s demo, Stadia has had a big leap.
The Unknowns
If things go according to plan for Google, this might be the game changer that has the power to alter the whole future of the gaming industry. With Stadia, there is no need to upgrade hardware as it enables any device to play almost any game.
The future seems so bright for Stadia, but mishaps can happen any minute. Access to the internet is vital to its performance might depend heavily on how good the connection is where users base. So if in the parts of the world that the Internet’s speed is slow, will Stadia able to work? This question might need time to answer as all we know now is a short demo in a room with favorable conditions, which speak little of Stadia’s performance in real life.
Google is remaining quiet about the list of games on Stadia’s library, which is another concern. The technology might be a breakthrough but if it cannot offer what players need, the outcome might not what Google wants to see.
The last question is how much Stadia will cost. It is still unknown whether it will come with a monthly subscription fee like Spotify or players will be charged by the game they play like they do with Steam.
Google has not answered all of these above questions but it said that more details were coming in the future, and that is all we know.
>>> Latest news on Gurugamer.com!
Comments