When Google launched its Stadia cloud game service in November 2019, we were impressed with the concept but the execution was lacking. Nearly a year and a half after its debut, Stadia has slowly acquired the features that Google initially bragged about, bringing it closer to the service that has the potential. Stadia isn’t nearly perfect and Google still has some work to do, but it’s a much better service these days than it was at launch.
The news that Google decided to withdraw from the business of making original games because Stadia prompted some to wonder if the service is long for this world. That’s why we’ve decided to re-evaluate Stadia to see if it has a future. We don’t have a crystal ball, of course, but after digging in thoroughly to see what progress Google has made since the launch of Stadia, we still think it has potential – if Google doesn’t give up completely.
In the past year and a half Google has been steadily improving Stadia with features that make the service more fun and much easier to use. One of the most “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 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, so it didn’t make much sense not to offer a wireless option at launch when you could connect the controller to a Chromecast wirelessly. However, that has changed.
Stadia added wireless capability to the PC last May, and while that’s a big improvement, I have to admit it was a problem getting the controller to connect to my PC. I found out that it automatically paired with my Chromecast and manually unlinked, but I still had issues getting it to connect to my PC. Apparently this is a common problem, as a quick search found a solution: Run Chrome in Windows 7 Compatibility Mode. It’s an easy fix for an annoying bug.
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Google recently added State Share, timed with the launch of Assassin 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. Those 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 inventory items, and try to play through the same part of the game. Developers will have to add this feature to their games, and there’s no telling how many will, but it’s neat.
Another welcome addition to Stadia is Crowd Choice, which is finally available to users with the release of Baldur’s Gate 3 last October. When enabled, streamers can give their viewers the option to vote on the choice they have to make in-game. The option that gets the most votes will be displayed in the game’s live stream. This feature is now also available in Dead in daylight, and it’s a really useful way to create more interaction with viewers.
Direct streaming to YouTube launched last December, just in time for Cyberpunk 2077’s launch. Next to Twitch, YouTube is probably the second largest platform for streamers, and having a built-in feature to stream directly from Stadia to YouTube should have been a nice feature for some streamers. I’m not a pro, but I stream for my friends on Twitch every now and then, and I’ve never really messed with XSplit. Direct streaming is much more convenient.
Complementing the list of Stadia unique features first announced by Google in March 2019, Crowd Play finally made its debut last December in games such as Mortal Kombat 11, Borderlands 3, Dead in daylight, and a few others. If someone is streaming one of these games, they can invite their viewers to play with them on Stadia. This is a co-op and multiplayer feature, of course, so it makes sense why the above games were the first to get it.
That is a lot! Need a break? What water? A snack? Caffeine? That’s only half of the changes Google made to Stadia in the past year.
Many big names and indie titles have been added to Stadia since it debuted-Cyberpunk 2077, Hitman 3, Borderlands 3 and Baldur’s Gate 3 are the most notable. But quarantine has led my partner and I to look for more co-op games to play together, or single-player puzzle games that we can still play together. I have to hand it over to Stadia because I was introduced to a few games that were released a few years ago and still flew under my radar, such as The gardens in between, a beautiful but heartbreaking puzzle game about two best friends and neighbors reminiscent of all their backyard adventures just before … well, I won’t spoil it. The Turing test and Jotun are just a few other examples of games on Stadia that we like.
However, Stadia certainly needs more recent titles. That may seem problematic Google has closed its internal game studio, but the company has already struck deals with other studios, including Super heavy games (the masterminds behind Until sunrise and The Dark Pictures Anthology) to create new content for its library. The platform now allows players to link to their Ubisoft + account, just like Amazon’s Luna, but of course users need an active Ubisoft subscription. However, Stadia has a free tier, so you don’t have to pay for two gaming plans. The company plans to open up its streaming tech to other game publishers, so hopefully next year we’ll see more exclusives or releases timed alongside other platform launches.
Having enough bandwidth to play the games is a different story. A game like The gardens in between does not require much bandwidth just because of the graphics. It works fine at 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 more than 100 Mbps at 1080p to operate without pixelation, rubber banding or input lag. The game is otherwise not playable. However, this is a problem with cloud gaming in general and not much has changed in that regard since the release of Stadia.
My only big problem with Stadia is still how games are organized in your library. If you’re looking at your library on your phone, that’s okay – there’s a drop-down menu that lets you organize games by recently played or alphabetical order, and you can scroll through two columns of games at once. But on PC and your TV, it’s unnecessarily labor-intensive, with the TV being the worst of the two.
On the PC, you can see a 3×3 grid of your games, but the order in which they are organized is a combination of your most recently played games and games that were last added to your library. There is no option to alphabetize them, making it difficult to find a game that you haven’t played in a while or bought a while ago. Not only do the same strange organization rules apply on TV, but your library is arranged in one row that you have to scroll through until you find the game you want. If you scroll too fast, the system will occasionally skip a few game thumbnails. There really needs to be a unified way to organize your game library across all platforms for Stadia.
I also wish I could buy games directly from Stadia through my TV instead of having to grab my phone or go into my PC to buy a game there. You can do this with Xbox and PlayStation, and it seems to me that any platform with a console-like setup wouldn’t have the same function. Sure, putting the controller down and answering my phone isn’t hard, but I’ll be picky about this unnecessary step. I have the controller in my hand. Just leave me in the game store!
Stadia has significantly improved the way it manages screenshots. When the platform first launched, you could grab them with the screenshot button on the controller, but you could only view them on your phone and there was no way to share them. You can now watch them on the PC and the app on your phone, share screenshots and share status shares with a link, and video clips will now include voices if you save a clip when chatting in a game or live streaming to YouTube. You can also download screenshots and clips from Stadia to your local PC, but not on mobile devices.
And I can’t forget that iOS users can now play Stadia games in Apple’s Safari browser from this last December. Because of Apple’s strict App Store policies on cloud gaming platformsNever let Google iPhone and iPad users play games in the Stadia app in the App Store. But cloud gaming through WebRTC implementation, and that’s how GeForce Now users can game on Chromebooks, is completely fine.
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 Share is a thing now, so you can add people to your family group and they can play any of the games that you own on your account. You also don’t need an active Stadia Pro account to share or play shared games.
Phew, okay. That was a lot. And most of it is good.
The only thing holding Stadia back at this point is a lack of recently released games and games that support its unique state sharing and audience choice features. Those are no small hurdles to make Stadia more attractive to gamers, not to mention the bandwidth throttling that is always a problem with cloud gaming services in general until we actually try to close the digital divide in the US. But I digress. Stadia has made measurable progress over the past year. The service just needs to gain some momentum – if Google is stuck with it.