sounds attractive, and the potential
ad revenue for Google is massive.
Internet speed requirements
are a huge concern for would-be
promoters of the Stadia, too. Google
recommends a minimum of 25Mb/s
—more than twice the average
Internet speed in the US, and five
times Sony’s recommended speed
for PlayStation Now. Some games
are sure to devour bandwidth, and
for users with limited data plans,
Stadia could prove disastrous. Its
performance on low-end routers
and broadband packages remains
to be seen, but we can’t imagine it’s
good. Even on the Moscone Center’s
presumably industrial-standard
Internet at GDC, demos showed
slowdown and input latency.HEAD IN THE GAME
And what of the games? Doom
Eternal is a big-name title lined up
for Stadia’s launch, but we’ve seen
little else—just Assassin’s Creed:
Odyssey (feels like it’s everywhere
right now). Odyssey looks beautiful,
making it ideal for hardware
demos, and it’s no surprise it was
the star of the show at the Stadia
reveal; Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemotis a big proponent of cloud-based
gaming. In an interview with Variety
last year, he stated that he expected
to see “less and less hardware” in
the future of gaming, claiming that
“there will be one more console
generation and then after that, we
will be streaming, all of us.”
AMD promises a “robust”
suite of tools for developers to
optimize their games, and Stadia
is interestingly mostly running off
a heavily modified Linux variant.
Ogi Brkic, general manager of
AMD’s data center GPU business
unit, stated recently that AMD was
“delighted to work with Google” onStadia, promising “the reliability
and no-compromises performance
they (gamers) expect.” Google and
any developers working on Stadia
projects will be able to use the
open-source Linux drivers to more
closely examine the code at play.
It’s certainly promising, but there’s
no way of knowing whether devs
will take to it. Games will require
changes in code design to run
effectively on Stadia, and it could be
that developers decide that it isn’t
worth the hassle. Stadia is more
likely to unsettle the casual end of
console gaming than hardcore PC
gamers, but tackling the giants that
are Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo
on their home turf won’t be easy.
Whether Stadia will also support
downloading local copies of games
for improved performance—like
Utomik, or Xbox’s Game Pass—
remains to be seen as well. What
becomes of personal ownership
when a platform only offers access
to games on a subscription basis?
Subscriptions are becoming less
popular in the gaming world; a
decade ago, World of Warcraft
boasted seven-figure member
counts, but those numbers haveAssassin’s
Creed: Odyssey
does look
beautiful
running
on Stadia.cloud gaming