Google Stadia Cloud Gaming Review!

hey everybody it's the one from testedand today I'm going to be reviewing Google's stadia it's finally out this isthe found roots Edition which is out this week for those who pre-ordered itand I've been using it for about the past week playing a selection of theirlaunch titles and using it in a variety of conditions to see what theperformance and the feature set for cloud gaming at least from Google'sperspective is all about because I'm sure some of you have read or heard thisis this launch is not without some interesting launch conditions let's callthat so if you're not familiar stadia was announced earlier this yearsomething that Google has been working on for quite a long time now and it'snot necessarily their console because it's not real console hardware or a gameplatform it's it's a cloud gaming service they have data centers thatthey've set up they've built these server blades with very high-end PChardware a ton of potential compute an order of magnitude more potential powerthan when you get on like an Xbox one S and the ability to then render thosegames remotely and stream them over Wi-Fi or over Ethernet connection ontoyour pixel phone your laptop or Chromebook when your Chrome browser oronto a TV using a chromecast ultra in theoretically as high fidelity up to a4k HDR with iPhone 1 surround-sound and as low latency as you would be able toexpect playing you know almost any game in the home the idea is that you wouldnot notice it now we went into a deep dive at Google to chat with theirengineers about the kind of streaming technology that allows this to happenand encourage you to watch that I'm not gonna dive too much into thatcompression and latency technology today but we will talk about the experienceand there are a couple of tiers to stadia a lot of people have beenconfused about what you buy or what you getwhat's launching right now is the founders Edition so that's the paid tierto state and your pay essentially ten dollars a month and youdo get a couple months free with the founders edition the hardware that youbuy to get access to the service and with that you do get one free game atlaunch you get destiny too but then you also then have the ability to pay forgames full price games that you would go buy on PC or other consoles there willbe a free tier 2 stadia coming next year and that will be again you buy the gamesyou won't get the free game like destiny or whatever games they announced in thefuture and your streaming quality will be limited to 1080 so like might makemore sense for a mobile play or playing on a laptop but if you want the bestquality you have a 55 or 65 inch 4k HDR TV at home you might want to then lookat the paid monthly version of a stadia well you're not buying game consolehardware with stadia you're not buying a 300 or $400 game console or gaming PCthat you put in your living room or your office there is the opportunity to buysome hardware to make stadium work so the foundation comes with thiscontroller and you can buy the controller a la carte in the future andthe controller is really great it's it's designed really well has button paritywith with all the major consoles so you got your triggers your shoulder buttonsyou had a good d-pad two analog sticks that again feel really familiar ifyou're used to playing on an Xbox and some custom buttons for accessing thingslike google assist in and sharing videos right the center as well as a centerstadia button and it's over charged over USB or data runs over USB right now onmobile site it runs on pixel phones and this right here is what they're callingthe Google the claw attachment design internally this doesn't come with thefinal edition it will be sold exclusively on the Google store and it'sa really nice clip really well designed as well you clip it onto the controllerright here and exposes the headphone jack your stadia button as well as theUSB C port and then phone's can snap in right there the grip does for examplethis pixel 3xl you have to put it off-center because the grip would presson your volume buttons but you again you plug in the USB C cable right here andyou then have the ability to control your game on your phone and this isreally nice ergonomic design on a TV side if you want to play stating gameson a TV at launch will only work with the chromecast 4k the chromecast ultraand in fact at very launch it only works with the chromecast Ultra that ship witha Founders Edition and other chromecast ultros will need a firmware patch theversion that comes with the foundation has the Ethernet port right here whichis nice so you want the lowest latency you're gonna want to connect that overyour internet connection and not just use Wi-Fi but of course ideas that youcan play in almost places as you have Google Chrome orchromecast products so you can also play this on a laptop or PC in your Chromebrowser with a keyboard mouse or plugged in USB gamepad so let's talk aboutperformance now when I did my hands on with the stadia at Google's headquartersI was using their internet the part of the best possible case scenario not areally good time with the performance and latency and image quality and theirdemo session but taking it to home I was surprised to find that it was basicallythe same I do have gigabit access over sonicinternet at home and the latency on my TV using the chromecast and using thecontroller here was really really good like going doing an a/b test betweenthat and local Xbox one it was almost indistinguishable playinga 4k game on the TV if you go right up to the TV and you try to look at theanti-aliasing and look at some compression you may notice some of thatif you're going right up to the TV but at a standard distance away from the TVof about 10 15 feet no problems with the quality the quality even looks better ona mobile phone of course that's running at the phone's resolution in case of thepixel 3xl that's 1080p and I was just flabbergasted I love looking at thesehigh-end console games and PC games like Tomb Raider rendered on this phonebecause my brain just doesn't believe it works right because I'm waiting for thephone to overheat I'm waiting for the battery drained down the fans aren'tnothing like makes me feel like this is watching a youtube video it looks likeit's locally rendered I'm like pixel peeping and trying to see if I can seedithering but it just looks great on the mobile device the thing that doesn'twork so well on the mobile device is sometimes the UI a lot of these gamesare designed for play on big screen TVs or designed for play on a computerscreen a 27-inch monitor 24 inch monitor and when scaled down to a six inch phoneI am finding that the UI isn't adapted to be biggerfor the phone I am squinting to read the text a lot of the prompts that pop up soit's not optimized for this size of display and I did find myself wanting totap the screen to hit dialogue buttons when it says press a to close this oneor okay I want to hit that okay button with my finger but developers for thesegames haven't made them touch compatible no don't know if that would be possibleto do so because when you play this on a PC on the Chrome browser keyboard mouseis activated so I'm wondering could they just activate touch as an analog to amouse click for example I know I know Mel touching doesn't work I still findmyself regularly trying to touch the screen on this phone as I'm playinggames on stadia the places where I did find the most noticeable compression ordeer the ring ended up being on a web browser and on the PC screen and youknow you do need a decent internet connection to make this workevery time you load a game there will be a check on your connection so home Wi-Fiand our office Wi-Fi which is obviously not the best Wi-Fi thanks Comcast stillstream fine but places like Airport free Wi-Fi that's not good actually beingable to work and won't even try to run the game on poor Wi-Fi connections soyour experience may vary right now it won't even work over mobile connectionsand it will consume a fair amount of bandwidth if you're at home on a 4kstream for example you may get up to 15 gigs per hour of download for just thevideo streaming but of course if you're talking about of game like Red DeadRedemption 2 which is already gonna be over a hundred gig download perhaps thatis a little bit of a trade-off and some of the advantage of course of stadia isthat you're not having to download or update not only the game but also thehardware system the promise is that over time Google will update their serverHarbor so you're always going to be getting the cutting-edge some of thosebenefits are supposed to also be immediately noticeable now becausethey're using fast storage but game load times are still here I'd say they'recomparable to having a SSD on your system but you are waitingfor load screens that was a little bit surprised I thought the promise would bethat games would be optimized to load almost instantaneously and that'ssomething that console makers are putting into their next-generationconsole designs so this definitely unless they adapt that to work for thosegames on stadia feels more like a current gen console situation less thansome magical next gen immediate loading console game I talked about the UI andsome of the adaptations that the developers have to make for their gamesto work on stadia and there's a fair bit under the hood it seems that developerswill have to tune for example you can't just graphic settings in games you havegamma settings and brightness settings but it's not the PC game experiencewhere you can toggle between resolutions or anti-aliasing none of that istransparent to the user there's also some back-end work done to make sure thesavegame works with stadia between differentinstances but you don't get access to the file data or mod ability and that'sstill something to be determined how stadia will work with mods it'ssomething they're aware of but they just haven't revealed to users just yet itreally feels like a lot of the UI work is adapted to make work for big screensI think it looks really great on a big 65 inch TV and it looks really good onyou know 27-inch computer monitor as well the game the graphics look great ona mobile phone and it's amazing for it to see it running on a Chromebookbut the UI elements aren't perfectly scaled for those sized screens at thispoint I don't know how much work developers have to do so make thatcustom work to make that look a little bit better but the idea is that you'resupposed to be able to swap between devices and I was curious how thatswapping would work so there is you know in the stadium if you back out of a gameor of your pause a game and you load up the web browser you can say resume stateand you have a basically a grace period if you turn off your chromecast andyou're then moving on to your office and loading stadia up on your officecomputer you about a five to ten minute grace periodwhere it's gonna save that exact state any longer than that then the serverbasically to reverse to a save game and you have to load the game from the mainmenu so it's not quite instantaneous nor is it quite as persistent as I'd hope sothat idea that in the future you'll be able to pause the game in your livingroom jump on you know jump in a lift or a rideshare and play the game on yourphone and then and then play it at the airport and then play it on airplanethat's not gonna be anytime soon what's also not available at launch maycome down allowed are some features that Google made announcements for when theyannounced stadia earlier this year and that includes crowd play the ability towatch a youtube video of someone playing their game of city alive click joinmultiplayer and join into that game immediately in their browser that soundslike really cool potential for a cloud gaming not available at launch nor isState share the ability to share where you are in your save game with someoneseamlessly so they can jump into where you are and you guys can play you knowasynchronously but have that state sharing of savegames not available nor is stream connect the ability for people to take abunch of different streams of people playing stadia games and then compositethem in some type of UI again lots of cool opportunities that take advantageof cloud gaming but not ready at this point right now there's even just tryingto get parity with the console gaming experience and at launch they don't evenhave things like achievements or the friend pass just yet what I would alsolove and I think would help stadia is ability for them to enable some type ofdemo mode something that would allow people to try games out maybe play thefirst 10 or 15 minutes of a game begins used that cloud streaming service andthen that would maybe entice people to then buy the full version of the gamethat's what I would like to see come to cloud gaming in general but perhapswhat's most disappointing about stadia at launch is the available games listsGoogle put out lists of all the titles and all developers they're working withand there are some notable admissions that hopefully would be out by the endof 2019 but at launch they're just 12 games yes there's the destiny to gamethat ever gets for free and that's importantbecause that's gonna be a closed ecosystem for multiplayer destiny toplayers on stadia can only play with other destiny to players on the stadiabut the other games you can buy right now you know the flagships includemortal kombat 11 shadow of the Tomb Raider the latest Assassin's CreedOdyssey and most notably probably Red Dead Redemption 2 is probably and that'slast year's a flagship title that's probably the best highest quality gamethat takes advantage of the fact that you don't that download a 100 gigabytegame file to get it playing immediately and I think the games that they'vepromised coming down the line things like do maternal and cyberpunk 2077that's gonna really push the limits of the latency and quality you know the gaya game like cyberpunk is gonna look amazing and it's probably a massive gamefile that could potentially take huge advantage of clouds streaming and a gamelike dual maternal twitch shooter that is gonna push the limits of the lowlatency which will vary for different people in the launch countries forstadia there are also considerations like I mentioned data caps you knowstreaming if you have a Gigabit Ethernet connection chances are you probably haveunlimited data so using up to 15 gigabytes per hour streaming 4k HDR 5.

1audio video isn't gonna be a problem but if you have a cap data connection youknow 1080p streaming will take up to ten gigs per hour even 720p connection willtake up to four point five gigs an hour that can add up but it doesn't bode wellfor when Google and other cloud streaming cloud gaming servicesinevitably want people to be using this on the go with their mobile internetconnections with their Verizon and 80t mobile plans and they're gonna be thecosts associated with that and that's what they're thinking is this is a longterm play google says they're in this for the long haul they've built up aninternal game development studio to make games which we won't see the fruits offor maybe several years they haven't shown anything for that yeah and I'm notworried about necessarily the technology I know that Googleas the data centers they there they are the right people to be investing incloud streaming and both Sony Microsoft Neiman Nvidia they've already investedin cloud streaming that feels less like a proof-of-concept technology we evensaw working to some extent years ago with online and more of an edit abilitybut my fears of stadia is gonna be the game support and one how difficult willbe for developers and publishers to port their games to stadia you know they knewthis launch was coming and even then they only have these 12 titles at launchthings aren't ready why is that the case is it really that much more work on thebackend to adapt these games I understand it's not gonna be a onebutton solution to make a PC game work on the stadia platform but if it's gonnabe a lot of work that means a lot of costs and so my other fear is thatpublishers may be scared away not only by that cost but the unproven marketthat is stadia and cloud gaming in general it's that chicken and eggproblem you know publishers may not want to invest and spend the money makingtheir games work on this platform if there aren't enough users out there andthere aren't gonna be enough user out there if there aren't enough compellingreasons or content to make people adopt this platform and at launch right nowwhere they're already asking people to spend ten dollars a month on this orpaid invest 130 dollars on the founders edition there's a not a lot to make meconvinced that there's gonna be a big enough community to convince morepublishers to jump on board now Google has a lot of money they can invest inthe technology they can invest in the game studios maybe they could alsoinvest in ways to get people into this platform for free and so the next tieryou know the free version of CD I think will be a lot of the proving grounds forthis service and for stadia in the first year of launch that's coming in 2020so in 2019 right now November as the stadia has launched it really feels likemore of a beta launch I wish Google would be more transparent about that youknow not all the features are there and yeah this like other Google productswill have more feature rollouts but if it's something that they announced backin March and have promised throughout the months and they're calling this alot that's just not acceptable because thisis not YouTube or Google Docs you know this is supposed to compete with PC gamewith Steam with epic the games store with Xbox with PlayStation and thoseconsoles those platforms don't launch with almost half of their feature setnot there with the promise of the feature set coming and with this paltryof a launch lineup so consider this an evaluation of school stadia beta in mymind it's still beta at launch and we'll come back and reevaluate it a couplemonths down the line when there are more opportunities playing more games whenthe free tier comes out and when that community builds thanks for watching ifyou have other questions about clouds streaming about stadia please feel freeto post them in the comments below and we'll try to address them as best we canand we'll see you next time.