What’s The Point In Stadia Now?

After only 14-months of Google Stadia flopping out like a breast in a particularly loose-fitting halter top, Google is trying to both push itself back into the loose top and tell you that it is a perfectly fine piece of clothing with no issues. I guess that weird analogy only works if you think of it happening at an already awkward moment, such as a kid’s birthday party, or a funeral. Either way, the point I am trying to get to is this. Google recently announced that all first-party studios that were working on exclusive games for Stadia will now be disbanded and reallocated throughout the company.

My ultimate point is, what is the benefit of having Google Stadia now? There is one argument that I could see, but it brings up two issues I have with the industry as a whole. “It will save space as you don’t have to store disks,” Ok, that would track if we didn’t already have digital purchase from places like Steam, GOG and the Epic Games Store, along with my library of games bursting at the seams on the Microsoft Store and the PlayStation Store. “It saves hard drive space too!” I am sure I hear you shout, which is an issue with games like The Last of Us Part 2, Grand Theft Auto V, and Red Dead Redemption 2 all cracking the 80-120GB range. They aren’t the only ones either.

Though let’s take some of what was recently announced via a blog post for the coming months of Stadia: Shantae: 1/2 Genie Hero Ultimate Edition and Shantae: Risky’s Revenge – Director’s Cut. Two games that, by all means, take up less than 6GB together. Even Hellpoint (which I reviewed) takes up as little space as 3.1GB on the Xbox and up to 6GB on PC. Other announcements such as Kaze and the Wild Masks (a new release), Killer Queen Black, Street Power Football, or It Came from Space and Ate my Brains hardly crack the 6GB mark. The only games in the announcement cracking that are Judgment (35-ish GB) and FIFA 21 (50-ish GB).

For bigger games like that, the ones that are sometimes needlessly large (FIFA!), then yes, I could see it being the case of space-saving. With the recent announcement though of first-party studios closing, and this more recent statement: “These games represent just a sampling of the more than 100 games that will be added to the Stadia store for our players in 2021 to share, experience, and play with friends.” Then the question becomes, what does Stadia actually provide that other platforms aren’t?

Cloud streaming. Well, PlayStation players can swear at the dreadful infrastructure of PlayStation Now. Which is system that, last I checked, has a memory close to that of an Alzheimer’s patient and will very often take seconds to take input. There is that Project xCloud (now called Xbox Cloud Gaming), but I can honestly say that in the now five months since its launch, I’ve yet to hear a word good or bad about it. Reviews seem to be fairly positive, but beyond that, I’ve yet to hear someone of the general public talk about the service. That is damning I know, when your service is so under the radar that I had to check it was actually out, as no one was talking about it. Both of those options are with first-party studios.

With the news of the closure to first-party Google studios, the quoted line was that the service was meant to rearrange focus on providing a better service than any other platform. I said this before, but you need a good infrastructure in place to hold this to be true. The U.S. infrastructure is a mess, with states featuring portions of their population without internet access at all. Additionally, there are many others without much of a choice. I’d go as far as to say that applies to a majority of Europe and especially the UK, with 95% of adults (18-75) in the UK (the third-highest number in Europe) in 2018 using the internet, while in the US in 2019 the number was calculated as 90%.

To continue this, in 2019 the regulatory body Ofcom estimated that as few as 53,000 homes (I assume rounded down) in the U.K. can’t connect to 4G or “decent” broadband. While U.S. home broadband usage in 2019 is estimated to be 73%, with an estimated 10% of American adults who don’t use the internet for any reason. With rural Americans on the back foot, in 2019 for all rural residents in the U.S. only 63% of them have home broadband, while a relatively higher number of 71% have a smartphone. The point I am trying to make is, with as many as 19-million Americans without access to the internet, and with those that do have access often having unstable connections. How stable can a cloud-only service be?

Google Stadia may work for you relatively well, I am not denying those experiences happening, but more often than not, there can be issues. You’ve probably heard it, “input lag” is a common issue with those using the service of cloud gaming. For something slow and turn-based that’s fine. Let’s say on March the 17th, Stadia will get a game about tracking where a ball is on a field of 23-men (odd because there is a ref), and you have to make split-second decisions for whether you should drop to the ground and send spikes towards some man’s legs or not. FIFA 21 is one of those games where you need as little of a delay as possible.

It is not life or death, as you’d find with something like… Sekiro, or as it is called in my house: Several swear words and a possibly racist comment towards that Guardian Ape. Don’t worry, it is just a comment about his cousin, Wayne Rooney. Right, jokes aside, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a game where over time you just become like one of those weird speedrunners of fighting games with those stupid controls. To say “delay doesn’t matter” is reductive, because that game is all about the speed of your reaction, as most FromSoft games are. You have people like me who will moan if I press a button and my action doesn’t take in time before the wasp of death rips my eyeball out and insert it places.

Though my biggest issue isn’t just because of that issue, which can in due time be taken care of with better services provided and better infrastructure. My biggest issue is that of longevity: Let’s say that Stadia doesn’t convince the people it needs to, a mass population looking to play games. If it stays fairly niche in terms of sales, what stops Google from doing as it has always done? Closing down things that aren’t productive, as it has recently done with its own first-party studios. When the servers are shut down, you no longer have the thing you paid for, the thing you were banging a drum about being the future.

That’s fine if you work at Google and you only played one or two games on the service, but let’s say you make this your primary platform, and you can’t afford a PS5 or Xbox Series X/S. Paying the $130 for the hardware (a controller and dongle) and $9.99 a month for Stadia Pro isn’t better for you than owning a Windows PC or Xbox. Game Pass is the best deal in gaming, period. In this hypothetical realm where in the future Google shutters the service, that $130 plus any $60 game purchases and the cumulative expense of the Pro subscription can be more than owning any of the other services.

Yes, the PlayStation Store or the Microsoft Store might close, or update servers might close down the line, but as long as you own your games and have them downloaded, you can still play them. This theoretical question now poses the ultimate reason Stadia isn’t beneficial, you are paying for nothing. The $60 fee is merely an entrance to servers, servers that Google will at some point close down. It is delusional to think otherwise, the company has a history of it and there is no such thing as “too big to fail.” As of March 2020, PocketGamer.biz reports that Stadia sold 107,000 units, with a sum of 600,000 downloads of the app.

Four days ago, GamesIndustry.biz reported on an ampere study of PS5 and Xbox Series X/S sales. This report notes that the Xbox family of consoles are lagging the PS5 sales and even the Xbox One post-launch sales at just 2.8-million sales. All the while the PS5 sales, as confirmed by Sony, suggest an improvement on the PS4’s launch (of 4.2) with 4.5-million units sold. All of this comes with stock shortages, scalpers, and all the issues of the 9th generation’s launch, which still out marks Stadia’s similar launch window. My point is, units sold shows a mark of impact in the industry; The Wii U (for example) sold 13.5-million, a failure. It was a little under two-thirds of what the GameCube would sell, which was considered a success.

Without more recent numbers, I can’t say definitively where Stadia stands, but there is a strong suggestion that it might not be worth creating first-party games for, methinks. It has been said, even here, you need the infrastructure then you need to sell your service to people from that. Someone in a rural area with an internet connection as stable as a call center worker on anti-depressants isn’t going to buy into a system that doesn’t work for them. Just as a 20-something with their dream job in a city, working in an office (remember those?), wouldn’t need a combine harvester to get to work. City workers with a higher median income also aren’t going to make your system the primary one of their choice.

So I am left asking myself the question, “what is the benefit of having Google Stadia now?” Yes, the fact you don’t store the game on your hard drive is great in theory, but in reality, you also don’t own the games you paid for. The wistful gaming historian in me says this is a horrible direction for gaming, as we can still play DS, Xbox, PlayStation 2, SNES, and Game Boy games, to this day. When Stadia closes, that’s it. The gimmick of Stadia is its inevitable downfall, with nothing but a piece of unusable hardware left in the far-flung future.

It is cheaper and better for you to buy a reasonably priced gaming PC, opening you up to hundreds of indie titles and big ones too. Otherwise, buy an Xbox One X or Xbox Series X/S and subscribe to Game Pass. I still hold it true, if you want the better (interesting) exclusives, PlayStation is your place to go. However, if all you want is a place to play the latest big titles, play some things on a subscription fee, and maybe pick up one or two other things, Xbox and Game Pass are a great value. For the best quality (polished) of exclusives, however, you’ll want to pick up a Nintendo Switch. None of which are qualities I’d argue Stadia has. Oh well, at least there will be 100 games coming to Stadia this year.