The Google Stadia Story

up with the latest advancements in gaming. This is something that first started happening to me back in the nineties, and I hated it then and I hate it now. I'm one of those folks who gets rubbed the wrong way when I have to turn down a graphics setting in a game just so that the game will run more smoothly. You know, in my head, I'm always thinking, this isn't how the game is supposed to be played. It's supposed to be played at the top of those settings.

That's what they made it for. But my machine just can't do that. Keeping up with the latest in graphics hardware is really expensive, and sometimes it's just plain impossible because of all of the gosh dang bitcoin miners who are scooping up all the ding dang during GPUs pardon my language. Well, consoles are an alternative to two PCs, I mean, obviously, but they come with their own drawbacks. For one thing, tracking down a PS five is a devilish lee hard thing to do right now as I

record this episode. For another, the latest generation of consoles don't really have a robust library to draw from yet their their brand new. The pandemic really messed up video game development. Most games that are available right now are remasters or titles that span generations of consoles. So you could get the PS five version of a game, but you're also thinking, yeah, but this is also available on the PS four. I could just play this game on

a cheaper console. Plus, you still have to upgrade every so often, right, I mean, if you want to keep up, you've got to buy another console when a new one comes out. Those some companies like Sony have a reputation of supporting older systems far beyond the launch of the

subsequent PlayStation console. Uh. The PS four is not really one of those, actually, because in order to try and meet more demand for PS five, Sony recently announced that it was discontinuing nearly all PS four models in an effort to switch their manufacturing process over to making more

PS five consoles. But what if you didn't have to worry about any of that, right, what if you could just subscribe to a service where you never needed to worry about upgrading your system because the games you play wouldn't be running on your device. It would be running on someone else's computer and it would be a screaming fast computer with the capability to push out four K resolution video, and you could play these games pretty much on anything, on a computer or maybe on your TV,

or even on your phone. That is the sales pitch for Google Stadium, a game streaming service, something that Google first unveiled in March nineteen during the Game Developers Conference. Now, let's be clear, Google Stadia is by far not the only cloud gaming service out there that does this. I mean, you can do this with PlayStation now, on Sony consoles or on a PC. Microsoft has x Cloud, which currently runs on Windows ten and Android and will later run

on iOS devices. And sometimes we call these types of models gaming on demand or sometimes cloud gaming. And Google Stadia or these other services. None of these are the first ones either. So today we're gonna talk about the history of cloud gaming and Google Stadia in particular. Now, I can't do just a full episode just on Google Stadia. There's not enough to talk about, and that's a big part of the problem with Google Stadia. But I can

explain the process of where this came from. Now you could argue that we saw the groundwork laid for cloud based gaming systems with games like the old M M O RPGs of the late nineties and early two thousands. I'm talking Your Ultimate Onlines, Your Ever Quests, and later Your World of Warcrafts. These required players to install software to their home systems that contained many of the assets

needed for the game. And then you have online servers often called shards in the early days thanks to Ultimate Online. And then you have those coordinating the actions of hundreds or potentially thousands of players so that you at playing locally on your machine see where everybody else happens to be. Because of this relationship between your computer and the server, these games typically took forms where problems like latency and data transfer speeds wouldn't be a huge issue, and the

local machines did a lot of the heavy lifting. So in this case, you're talking about a computer that's still running some hefty software on its own and then is working in tandem with a game server. But even the history of cloud gaming proper dates back quite a ways, and it also includes one of the greatest examples of vaporware. And according to at least some accounts, it was a total scam. So let's take a very quick detour to

talk about the Phantom. Now, way back in two thousand three, a company called Infinium Labs announced that it was working on a revolutionary gaming console it called the Phantom, and that name would out to be prophetic and the gold mine for snarky headlines, including some that I wrote. It was going to be an on demand video game service. It was essentially the basic concept for cloud based video game streaming stuff we actually have today. But back in

two thousand three, this was an incredibly ambitious plan. Now I say that not because the technology needed to run such stuff is particularly advanced. A decently configured PC could run games pretty well. You would need to build out the framework for the service. On the user side, you'd have to have some sort of portal through which the user could remotely log into that PC that's running the game.

So you would need to build some sort of software to allow for that, but it's essentially a remote log in. On a conceptual level, at least, it's not that complicated. But back in two thousand three, broadband was still just gradually rolling out to most of the people who would

be viable customers for such a service. Heck, according to the site all Connect, back in two thousand four, some of Internet users were still relying on dial up modems, and since those top out at fifty six kilobits per second, there's no way you'd have any sort of satisfying game experience on that kind of connection. Even if we were to assume that the actual Phantom business model was that you were to download games but you would only be able to play them for as long as you had

the permission from Infinium Labs. That would take ages over fifty six kilobits per second data line. That being said, the way the Phantom was marketed it sounded more like cloud gaming, less like you purchase a game and download it to your device. For modern cloud gaming services, you're generally looking at a recommended minimum bandwidth of around ten to fifteen megabits per second, and that's at the slowest level.

But even at that slow quote unquote level. That's nearly times faster than the top speed you would get with a dial up modem. At that speed, you're probably looking at games running at just seven twenty P resolution, which isn't even HD quality. So if you did want four K gaming, you're gonna need some fatter pipes, as they say, to deliver information faster. And by faster, I really mean amount of data per second. The transmission speed of the

signal is something else entirely, but that does raise another question. See, besides the barrier of how much data you can pull down per second, you also have latency issues. Latency is the lag you experienced between when you send a command and when you see that command carried out. So if you've ever been on a website and you clicked on a link and then you had to wait a bit

before anything happened, that's latency. And there's a lot of stuff that can cause cause latency, from the programming of a game to the distance that's between you and whatever

machine that game is actually running on. Heck, if you're playing on a local machine, so it's a computer that's like right in front of you, and it's in your home, and you have a wired controller connected to your computer, but for some reason, that controller has an absurdly long chord, like in this case, something that's many, many, many miles long. And I get it, this is an absurd, unrealistic example,

but I'm making a point here. Because that cable would be many miles long, you would experience latency as you push buttons and move the thumbsticks around because it does take time for the signal to pass through from the controller to your console. Now, we've got to keep in mind that the fastest speed anything can travel in our universe is the speed of light. However, signals moving through

cable move a little slower than that. If we're talking about coaxial cable, the electrical signal travels about two thirds the speed of light, So the speed of transmission depends upon the medium through which the signal is traveling. Anyway, my point is that the further the signal needs to travel from the host computer that's running the game to whatever device you're using to play the game, the more

latency you're going to encounter. Because physics, one way to cope with this is to have a lot of memory and the user's device and load as much of the game as possible onto the local machine, you know, the one connected to your television, for example, and it would be pulling data locally as much as it possibly could in order to cut down on things like latency as well as delivering higher resolution experience for you. But this would mean you would need to wait while your device

pulled down data from the host. It would be buffering. Essentially. This has its own set of problems. It's not a very practical solution. Games frequently are not optimized for this

sort of play. Most developers create games with the assumption that those games are just going to be played on a local device, So creating a game that can manage data this way requires a more specialized approach, and in fact, most of the time you're looking at a specific certification process for games to run on cloud gaming services in order to deliver the experience that the game developers intend the user to have. Then there's the way that information

travels across the Internet. We're not gonna go all the way into packet switching and everything that would take forever, but just imagine an actual net criss cross of all these different lines. So this is the kind of net that you would catch fishing. That mesh is made up

of these little lines that link with one another. So imagine that each of those links, each of those points where the the mesh is meeting, that represents a server or a router or a computer that's connected to the Internet, and you pick two links that are a good distance from each other. On the Internet, information can travel pretty much any available route between those two points, and it travels in packets, so not all the packets follow the

same pathway. This is part of what makes the Internet so robust because there are multiple pathways from the source to the destination, so information can get to where it's going even if some servers or routers go offline in

between the source and the destination. In other words, if I were sending you a file from my computer to your computer, the file would get divided up into packets of data, and those packets would travel across the Internet, going through various pathways, and then arrive at your computer and get reassembled like a puzzle, and then you would get the file. That's the way the Internet works, but

it does create some challenges when you're developing streaming services. Now, clearly it is possible to build out low latency high band with connections. But back in the early two thousands when Infinium Labs launched, these were in really concentrated regions and major metropolitan areas, and they were largely restricted to enterprise level transactions, which means this infrastructure wasn't really robust yet and most end users wouldn't have access to the

speeds needed to deliver a good experience. So all of this is to say that the technical requirements needed to make the phantom viable, we're not really what we had available to us back in the early two thousand's, at

least not from an Internet infrastructure perspective. If you did have broadband, and if Infinium Labs had built out lots of servers near your neck of the woods so that you're not dialing halfway across the globe to play a game, then arguably it was possible, but not necessarily practical, and not at very high resolutions or frame rates. And just to answer that question, frame rate or first to the number of frames or images that appear in a second

on your display. Higher frame rate generally means smoother animation, which is pretty easy to grasp. So imagine it's your job to draw a series of images that show a stick figure running, and you're going to flip through these images in a second. If you only have three sheets of paper, then you're only allowed to draw one image per sheet. You're really limited on the number of poses that you can draw. You can only draw three poses, so you're not gonna have a very smooth running animation.

If you have thirty sheets of paper, you can create a lot more poses, and you have allowed for smoother animation when those thirty sheets are are flipped within one second. If you had sixty sheets of paper, you could create even more subtle transitions and the animation would look even more smooth, and you start hitting diminishing returns after a while, particularly if you're consistently animating the sheets by flipping them at that same speed or as in like all the

sheets within a second. But generally speaking, the benchmark and gaming tends to be around sixty frames per second, with thirty frames being considered acceptable. Anything less than that is a problem. Anyway, that wasn't the end of the questions about the Phantom. People also wondered how this little startup would form the business relationships necessary to secure rights with all those video game companies in order to sell titles

to customers. Back in the physical media days, it was easy to think, hey, I bought a copy of this game. This copy of the game is mine, after all, we had the physical copy. But as streaming services began to appear, that thinking transitioned into I have purchased a license to

access this content. The same would be true for games, but established video game companies weren't likely to just allow us start up to purchase copies of games and then rent out time on fast machines so that other people could play those games without having to buy their own copy. There was going to be some sort of licensing fee and agreement that would need to be in place for that to happen, and that that's where things start to

get really complicated. There was no guarantee that any two video game publishers would even behave in the same way, so you might have to have unique agreements for every single publisher, and then you'd have to figure out how those economics work, and that in itself is a huge challenge. It's not an insurmountable one, mind you, but definitely a

tough one to solve. So this announced console, which Infinium Labs named the Phantom, and there were no end of articles online that pointed out how apt that name would turn out to be. It never materialized beyond some questionable prototypes that may or may not have had working components in them, and it's no big surprise as the idea, while intriguing, was way ahead of its time. The Phantom became the subject of a lot of skepticism and investigation.

If you do a search for stories about the Phantom and Infinium Labs, you're likely to find posts about how the address listed for the company led to what appeared to be unoccupied office space. There are accusations that the founder and various executives at the company were running a scam, and that the prototype devices the company showed off were dummy devices or other computers disguised as a Phantom console.

I don't know if the whole thing actually was a scam from the start, or if this was one of those situations where everyone started off with a sincere goal too really achieved this and it just proved to be unattainable. So the Phantom kind of falls in the same similar category as therein nos. Perhaps the worst part of what went on with the Phantom is that it led people to doubt the viability of a similar service later down the road, which would make it harder for companies to

establish a user base and revenue model. Even as we saw high speed, low latency solutions rolling out to larger populations, the story of the Phantom haunted those who hoped to provide online game gaming services. When we come back, i'll talk about another attempt to make an online gaming company that fell through, and we'll look at what Google hopes to do differently. But first let's take a quick break.

A few years after the Phantom debacle, there was a service called on Live Gaming on Live as I'm sure you all know, as a portmanteau of online and live, something I only just realized as I started taking notes this time, not that I had never heard of it before. I had heard of it, I just didn't put it together because I'm dense and slow. But on Live, despite existing and technically working, would have its own share of

controversy over the years. Now. The company was founded in two thousand nine, and it aimed to create a cloud gaming service in which people would rent access to game titles without having to download and installed them. So while the Phantom may or may not have been intended to do this, online definitely was. You played the games through a portal service on computers and mobile devices, or through a dedicated console system called the on Live game system.

Unlike the Phantom, this was something that actually existed as a consumer product, and with broadband adoption being much further along in the old days of two thousand four, it actually had perhaps a fighting chance. The founder of on Live was Steve Perlman, who had been responsible for some pretty big products in the past, like web TV and quick Time. He introduced the service in two thousand nine

at the Game Developers Conference. He explained that his system would allow gamers to play brand new titles at top settings without needing all the local hardware. One of the big elements that made it possible was a video compression strategy. On the server side, algorithms would compress outgoing video st teams to players. Software either on the player's computer or mobile device or on an online console, would decompress the

video on the other end. There were some latency issues, but the thing that really killed on Live was that players just never really joined up. According to the Verge at its peak on Live only saw concurrent players, which meant all the money the company had spent on server farms was wasted, as most of its servers were dormant most of the time. The company was reportedly burning through

five million dollars every month toward the end. The company's business model allowed users to demo games for free, so you could play like a demo level of a game, or you could purchase the rights to play a specific title, but very few people were doing more than just testing out games, and Online couldn't reach deals with several of the top tier video game publishers, so it's library was limited.

On top of all that, game companies demanded that Online offer their titles at the same price you would find on other stores, including those that allow you to actually download a copy of the game to your own machine, and the quality of the experience largely depended upon the

broadband connection of the user. So, in other words, if you're a gamer and you're told, well, you can buy a copy of this brand new game, it's gonna cost you sixty dollars if you want to download it to your computer where it will run on your hardware at the top level of your hardware's capabilities, or you could spend that same sixty dollars to run on this streaming service and potentially have a less satisfying experience. Well, that's

not much of a sales pitch. Meanwhile, a competing service called guy Kai g a i k Ai was meeting with more success, in large part because Geikai only offered limited playable demos of games. It didn't represent a threat to the video game companies or retail businesses because they

didn't sell games. And moreover, the founder of gei Kai was David Perry, who had a history in the video game industry, while Pearlman didn't, and Pearlman over it on Live really didn't like the guy Kai was making headway, and eventually he started to demand Onlve not support games that had found their way onto gei Kai, which further limited on Live's library. Ultimately, on Live just couldn't make

the business work. The company burned through its investment money, and in twelve Pearlman gathered staff together, said the company was folding, laid off everyone without severance, and then formed a new company that bought the assets of the old company and hired on a skeleton crew to run things which that burned some bridges. Sony would ultimately come along and scoop up on Live's assets, shutting it down in Sony,

by the way, also acquired guy Kai three years before that. Today, besides the Xbox and PlayStation streaming video game services that I've already you mentioned, there are a few more out there, like steamlink In, video Game stream and about a dozen other ones. So there's a big push still for making streaming video games a thing. And these are not all, you know, apples to apples. They have different features and different limitations. However, most of these services, not all, but

most of them are connected to established gaming platforms. Steam is Valves online store and is a major part of the computer game market. Xbox and PlayStation are obviously well established consoles, and cloud gaming is an enhancing feature for those systems, but it's not the defining feature, at least not yet. So while there are a lot of cloud gaming services out there, many of them are extensions of already established brands in the gaming world. But let's get

into Google's product stadia. Around Google team members began to explore the potential of developing their own cloud gaming and streaming service. Now the company had already launched a streaming product called chrome Cast. In chrome Cast is a device that connects to television's via an hd M I plug,

and the device also connects to your WiFi network. You can cast content from other connected devices like computers or smartphones and send it to the chrome Cast to view on your television, So you can cast movies or a web page if you wanted to, to your computer and view it that way. The team working on cloud gaming over at Google Fiber would join up with the chrome Cast team to work on the project, which got the

name Project Stream. The team sought out how to optimize data traffic to allow for high bandwidth, low latency video games streaming, and the whole project was kept under wraps for four years. In October, Google showed off a beta build of Project Beam. Beta testers had a chance to try out the service on devices like a Chrome Book playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey from Ubisoft. And that's pretty impressive, and then it shows off the advantages of this model

of gaming. Stefan at the end of the Verge reported that he tried it out on a Chromebook Pixel, which is particularly impressive as Google had stopped supporting the Pixel line of Chrome Books a couple of months earlier in Augusten. Now it's possible that Etienne really meant that he played it on a pixel book. That was the line of laptops that had been introduced in twenty seventeen, the successor to the Chrome Book Pixel line. But either way, it's

a really neat achievement. Now to understand why I call it impressive, it helps to take a look at the specs of a pixel book, and I'm going to use pixel books just in case that's what Etienne meant, rather than a Chromebook pixel. Just know that the Chromebook pixel

is even less powerful than the pixel book was. So pixel books can have either a seventh generation Intel I five or I seven processor, which Google says allows for a quote seamless four K output to an external monitor end quote, So you can connect this laptop to an external display and stream out four K video. You can get them with either eight gigabytes or sixteen gigabytes of RAM.

They come with a solid state storage drive with a capacity of either hud gigabytes, two hundred fifty six gigabytes, or five hundred twelve gigabytes, and it has the Chrome Operating System as its OS. That's about it for the technical specs, apart from the fact that it has two USBC ports, which that's important if you're going to connect it to uh display. Now, those are some pretty modest stats for a PC, and definitely humble when you compare it to a truly fast gaming rig. There's no fancy

cooling system in the pixel Book. There's no souped up graphics processing units or any other bells and whistles that you'll find on a state of the art gaming PC. The pixel Book price is an arrange from about a thousand dollars up to sevent hundred for the top of the line model, and that still is pretty darn price. But there are less expensive Chromebook models, and of course the most recent iteration of this line is called the pixel Book Go and it has a less grandiose scale

of prices. But let's compare that to one of the most expensive off the shelf gaming pieces of two thousand eighteen to see how it stacks up. You know, compare this against a state of the art gaming rig. So Stefan at the end, that same guy who who reviewed his experience on the Project Stream Beta also had a chance to try out a true monster of a gaming rig earlier in eighteen. This was not connected to the

pixel book stuff at all. The device he used was called the main Gear F one three one, and you can configure the F one thirty one in numerous ways which would affect the price, right Like you can say, all right, I want this, but I don't need dad,

and that will change the price. However, the version that e t N tested tipped the scales at eight thousand dollars a princely su Indeed, the F one thirty one at t N tested had a Core I seven processor as its CPU, with a clock speed of four point seven giga hurts but overclocked to five giga hurts, and it had two g t X ten a d t I g p U s add a custom liquid cooling system to keep everything nice and chilly, because electronics and heat don't mix very well and those kind of processors

generate a lot of heat. It had thirty two gigabytes of RAM, a five twelve gigabytes solid state drive, a four terabytes standard hard drive, a twelve hundred WHAT power supply, and a Blu ray drive. And there were other cosmetic enhancements to the PC, including remote controlled led lighting in

the case. So this was a mache being designed to run the latest games in ten at their top settings with no hiccups, and at the end proclaimed it was quote practically future proof for at least the next one to two years end quote, which tells you how quickly the hardware cycle really is. This is Moore's law in

action that we're talking about. So let that sink in eight thousand dollars for a computer that could potentially need to be upgraded in if you're lucky, two years time to keep up to speed with the latest standards and games that Now you're starting to see where the value proposition is in the cloud gaming model, right. But this really nails down how that video game streaming model can

be really attractive. The most valuable component on a top of the line pixel book is the capacity to connect to a four K display for ultra high definition video. The processor, while it's good, is not the best. There's no specialized graphics card in there. So with relatively simple components, you can still play the latest games incredible graphics. You don't have to worry about GPU shortages or anything like that.

Because Google is worrying about that for you on their end, and you wouldn't have to upgrade your machine like ever unless it broke down, and that's because the actual games are running on the cloud, not on your computer. It also would mean that Google might potentially allow players to stream top tier games to mobile devices, as long as those devices also have a good Internet connection, and the initial impressions among beta testers and cities with good broadband

infrastructure was really positive. In twenty nineteen, during the Game Developer Conference of that year, Google revealed that Project Stream was now becoming an actual product called Google Stadia. At the time, a lot of people expected Google to unveil a full console, albeit one that facilitated streaming games. So they were thinking, oh, they're going to have a set top box that you plug into a router and then you plug the other end into the television and you're

good to go. But instead they found out that Stadium is really more of a service and it's less about specific consoles and more about a family of technologies to have a lot of potential points of contact with the

end user. Google did unveil one piece of proprietary hardware, however, it's a game controller, that looks pretty similar to an Xbox controller, complete with two thumbsticks, shoulder buttons, triggers, and a four button layout on the right side, and it also has a few systems specific buttons for navigating menus and activating various features. But what would this controller actually

connect to. Well, it could wirelessly connect with a Chrome Cast Ultra, so if you happen to have one of those connected to your television and your WiFi network, you could wirelessly connect to your controller to that device and the network, and you could then navigate the service and play games on your television. If you were using a phone at launch, you needed a way to plug the

controller into the phone using a USBC cable. Then you could buy a little clip on framelike device that would hold the phone and landscape orientation just above the controller, turning this into kind of an interesting little Jerry rigged

handheld gaming system. Or you could connect to a PC running the Chrome browser, so you just initiate Stadia through the Chrome browser, and you could use any wired game pad or a mouse and keyboard, uh was, whatever your choice was, And all three of these methods would give users access to the Stadius service and moreover, at least. Google's pronouncement was you would be able to swap between them and pick up where you left off previously. More

or less, it wasn't. It wasn't a completely seamless experience, especially early on. So how was this announcement received, Well, we'll find out after this quick break on launch day. There was still a great deal of skepticism regarding Google Stadia for multiple reasons, and allow me to list a

few of them. At launch, Stadia costs for the controller and access to the service, which after three months would include a ten dollar per month subscription fee, on top of which you would need to pay more money to purchase a premium game on the service and add it to your library. Now, initially, even with all those fees, that's still cheaper than a console and much cheaper than a high end gaming rig, But over time those expenses

start to add up. That being said, at launch, Google announced that the plan was to move to a free service, dropping the subscription fee. Still, if you wanted to be an early adopter, and meant you were paying three separate fees, the initial purchase price, the sub scription, and then the cost of any games you actually wanted to buy. Another big reason for skepticism was that Google has a pretty

shaky reputation when it comes to services. The company does have quite a few solid products, of course, Google Chrome commands more than six of the browser market share according to stat Counter, and Safari takes a distant second place at around twenty. Tools like Gmail and Google Drive Suites have stuck around. Google Maps is very popular. But then there are the numerous Google products that debuted and then went away, sometimes with very little hulla balu, and sometimes

the holo was all over that. Below there's an entire website called killed by Google dedicated to documenting these things. I'll give just a few examples. Google Hangouts is on the way out. It's still around right now, but it will be discontinued this year. Google play Music was recently unplugged. Google Fiber tv has gone off the air. The YouTube gaming app has a game oversign on it, which seems

like a bad omen considering this topic. Google Goggles went dark, Google Wave waved by by Google buzz buzzed off, Google Plus is now a minus, Google Now is later, and then we've got Picasa and or cutting who I can't really do puns about, but the list goes on and on. Now, the point is that Google has a long history of coming up with interesting ideas, launching a product that may or may not be half baked, and then pulling support for that product at some later point. Some of the

projects make a real go at it. They might stick around for a few or even several years. Some don't last very long at all, And many of the cases I've personally seen, I've noted that it felt often like the product was made almost exclusively by and four engineers. Now, I don't mean that as a knock on engineers, but what I do mean is that a lot of these products place a good deal of responsibility on the user to figure out how to get the most out of

the product. They are not dumbed down or idiot proof, and that can be a bad thing. If you happen to think the way the engineers who made the product thought, Well, it may just work for you because you're thinking is in line with what they intended. But if you don't, you might find yourself really frustrated with the experience, and you'll give up on it because you're not using it the way they thought you would. That's not necessarily your

fault and eventually Google might give up on it too. Again, that's not me saying that these products were bad. Some of the ones I've mentioned were products I loved and depended upon. I still miss Google Wave to this day, but I admit it was a tool that had a limited number of use cases. Now, losing Google Wave was a bummer, but that didn't cost me any money. Google

Stadium is a different matter. So what happens if you join Google Stadium and you purchase games in Google Stadia, and then the company later decides that it's going to stop offering the service. The games you purchase don't live on any of your devices there in the cloud. Your purchase price is more about getting access to the experience of playing that. But if Google shuts down Stadia, then presumably you won't be able to access those games anymore.

To compare this to traditional games, it would be like someone from e A comes to your home and demands you hand over all the copies of EA games you happen to have because e A is going to go out of business. That too, gamers doesn't make a lot of sense. They think I bought the game, I should still be able to play it even if you decide to shut down the service, but that's not how that

would work. Another reason some analysts were eyeing the launch with pessimism is that, as we've covered in this episode, the history of standalone cloud gaming services is not filled with success. The sales pitch for cloud gaming can hit a pretty narrow band of people. Serious gamers are likely already invested in gaming rigs and consoles, so they don't have a big need for another service that delivers games online, particularly if it's an experience that doesn't quite measure up

to the one they're used to. Moreover, if you're a serious gamer, you've likely spent the money on hardware to get the best experience you can, and chances are the experience you get over broadband just isn't going to measure up. Stadia also didn't have any exclusive games, really, so that meant that all the titles you could find on Google

Stadia were also available on other services. And if you're able to buy the game and run it on a native device without worrying about latency or anything like that, it just seems like that would be the natural route you would choose. Then there are things well beyond Google's control that we're a factor. A big one of those are data caps. That's the limit that I s p's often put on user accounts per month. For example, Comcast has a one point to terabyte data cap per month

for most accounts. If you want the ability to use more data than that, you have to pay for it, either by getting a limitless account or by paying overage fees when you go over the limit. If you listen to the news episode I did last week, you know that Massachusetts is currently pushing back on Comcast for doing that to customers in the state. It's something that the company has been doing for a while in other states,

and it's not the only one now. As you might imagine, streaming four K video can eat up a lot of data, even though most of the time we're actually talking about ten eight resolution video that then gets upscaled once it hits its destination. If you are an avid gamer, you could chew through that data limit pretty quickly with some long gaming sessions. And so some critics pointed out that in a world with data caps, this business might not really have a place. And then there were the problems

of some unfulfilled promises at launch. So when Google announced Stadia in March of twenty nineteen. The company made some pretty big claims. One was that you would be able to stream to YouTube in four K resolution right off the bat, and another was that you would use a button on the controller to activate Google Assistant when you could get real time and relevant tips as you play through. So imagine you're playing a game, and maybe it's a puzzle game, and you hit a particularly tough puzzle and

you're just having real trouble getting through it. You could hit the Google Assist button, according to Google, and get tips on what you would need to do in order to make it through that part of the game. You just ask your assistant for help. You could, the company claimed, watch your favorite YouTube gamers and with a push of a button, leap right into the same part of the same game that the YouTuber was going through, so you

can measure your own skill against the YouTuber. The system would offer a cross platform for play for titles as well, according to Google, and there was more. There was a comment that you could watch a video on YouTube and let's say you get an ad for a video game. With the push of a button, you could add that game to your library and purchase it right through Google Stadia, but a lot of these promises just weren't in place

when the product finally launched later that year. For example, the flagship game on the Google Stadia system was Destiny To, a popular multiplayer shooter game, but Bungey, the studio behind Destiny To, revealed in June two nineteen that the Stadio version would not be cross platform, but rather a walled off ecosystem of its own, So if you were playing on Stadia, you wouldn't be able to play with your

buddies who have to be playing them on PC. For example, As the project got closer to launch, other promises had to be tweaked. The Google Assistant feature was scaled way back. You wouldn't be able to stream to Chrome PCs in four K with HDR at lawn either, none of the games would have those YouTube features I mentioned at launch, and there were some other setbacks as well. These things

do happen. Again. Google wasn't launching a standalone console, but rather a service that connects to various pieces of hardware, and that's a lot of figuratively moving pieces, and not all of them were in place by the time of launch. That being said, the Google Stadia team was hard at work on Stadia features. Google also established a new division called Stadia Games and Entertainment, and they hired Jade Raymond, a former would be Soft employee, to head up that division.

Part of what this division will do will be to develop exclusive titles for the Stadia platform. Today, you can make a Stadia account for free, but to get access to features like four K resolution on TVs connected to Chrome Cast Ultra, or sixty frames per second at ten a D resolution, or a selection of free games, you have to subscribe to the Google Stadia Pro service, and the premium subscription service is as of this recording, ten

dollars per month. The controller now will set you back sixty and beyond the free titles that Google offers, you can purchase other games and add them to your cloud library. You can stream to YouTube, though some of the other YouTube related features still aren't active as of this recording. Google launched an iOS compatible version of Stadia in December twenty twenty, and the team continues to update users on what's new with a platform on the Google Stadium blog.

I've tried this out myself a little bit with a Google Stadia Premier edition and full disclosure to you guys. This was something Google offered to me for some reason, not as a part of tech stuff, mind you. They didn't reach out to me as a host of a podcast, but I got the offer as a Google customer. It might be because I'm a Google THI customer. I'm also a Google Pixel user. I don't know, but I figure I should men shin that I got the controller for free, and I got a couple of three months on the

premium service to try it out. And it's not a bad experience, but it doesn't really replace having a gaming PC or a current generation console, at least I didn't feel it did. I find that depending on what platform I'm playing, controls can feel a little floaty at times. However, that could also just be the games I've tried out, because I've been playing games that I don't own on other platforms, so it's not an apples to apples comparison.

And I haven't spent as much time on Google STADIU as I would like, because um, I've been real busy, y'all. The platform does have some neat benefits. Stadia can frequently support larger multiplayer games than other platforms. So you can have much larger contests with certain titles, you know, if you have like, uh, you know, army type battles, you can have a lot more players involved at once, which

is kind of cool. Uh. There's a picture and picture feature that you can apparently use with for ends, which would give you a view of your friends point of view in a in a smaller picture in a corner of your screen. So imagine that you're both playing like Rainbow six Seizure or something. Not that this game necessarily is on Stadia or is supported by this, but this

is the example. You might have a buddy that you're playing with, and you would be able to see your buddy's point of view in your lower the lower corner of your screen, you know, so that way you can coordinate with them and better go through a level for example. Now I have not seen this. I haven't tried it out because I don't have any friends who are on Stadia. I do have friends, A promise they they just live in Canada. Yeah, that's it. All that being said, I

see potential with Google Stadium. I think it's going to have a hard time to attract customers, just like on Live did because the platform is not well established in the minds of gamers already. It's going toe to toe with some really heavy hitters, but Google well itself, is no slouch. I'm not sure if it's really going to be here to stay, which makes me reluctant to suggest

it to other people that they dive in. But if you do have a good Internet connection, then maybe you've got a four K TV and you want a chance to play some, but not all, of the top games out there without you know, having to build your own gaming rig, it might be worth a try. I realized that's not the most spectacular of endorsements, but it's my honest opinion. My hope is that Google will build out the service further and make it more attractive to users.

But then I think back to Google Wave and I sigh, Well, that wraps up this episode of tech Stuff about Google Stadium. If you guys have any suggestions for things I should cover on future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me. The best way to do that is over on Twitter. The handle is text stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an

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