idea of a free cloud gaming service
with an available premium membership
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 connection 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 Guillemot is 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, generalmanager of AMD’s data center GPU
business unit, stated recently that AMD
was “delighted to work with Google”
on Stadia, 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-figureAssassin’s Creed: Odyssey certainly looks
beautiful running on Stadia.62 |^ |^ August 2019