Warm-up act
Stadia finally emerges from the shadows, but to call it a launch may be stretching it
Stadia finally arrives, but calling it a launch may be stretching it
Perhaps in hindsight, the clue was in the title. In games, ‘Founder’s Edition’ can be a loaded phrase; it’s often the label given to a bundle of cosmetics and currencies given to those who pony up for an early-access game. It’s a way to sweeten the pill of being one of the first through the door, on the ground floor, of a building that’s still under construction.
So it proves with Stadia’s Founders Edition, which notionally provides you with everything you need to get up and running on Google’s much-vaunted cloudstreaming game platform. Our pack contains a Chromecast Ultra, the latest version of Google’s slender home streamer; a Stadia controller; and, most vitally of all, the access code that unlocks the service for us. The original pitch for Stadia positioned all of these things as optional extras: yes, you could fully buy into the ecosystem with Google-branded everything, but Stadia’s USP was that it would run on any screen, with any controller, wherever you were in the world.
The picture at launch – if that’s even the right word – is sadly quite different. Chromecast is the only way to play on a big screen, at least without hooking a PC directly to it and playing in a browser, and at launch, only the Chromecast Ultra supplied with the Founder’s Edition will support Stadia at all (existing devices will require an over-the-air firmware update promised soon after launch). The Pixel 3a handset Google also supplies is similarly vital, given the lack of iOS support; an app for Apple devices, provided early to us over the Testflight service, can only be used to launch games on other screens.
The theme continues into Stadia’s promised feature set. The Stadia controller’s USP – connecting directly to the Google data centre, bypassing your home network infrastructure to reduce latency – is only available on Chromecast at launch. Pressing the controller’s Google Assistant button, pitched as a way of getting help when you’re stuck in a game, yields a message that the feature will be available soon. Stream Connect, which combines two streams to power multiplayer games, is also absent, with Google only committing to a game supporting it being available before the end of the year. Family Sharing, State Share and Crowd Play won’t arrive until 2020; Buddy Pass, which lets a Founder’s Edition owner give a friend access to Stadia for free for a limited time, rolls out two weeks after launch. Stadia’s achievement system will be live on day one, but its UI won’t; it’ll track progress and those you’ve earned will be ticked off when the feature comes online. On it goes. That ground floor you got in on? It’s just walls and bare wiring.
All this would be easier to swallow were Stadia launching with a software line-up for the ages. Unfortunately the initial dozen games on offer do little to quicken the pulse. It is not without its bangers – Gwen Frey’s delightfully devious Kine is a highlight, Red Dead Redemption 2 is quite the catch, and we’re never going to complain about being given another way to play Destiny
– but it is hard to get excited about the likes of Mortal Kombat 11, Shadow Of The Tomb Raider or Just Dance 2020. The only exclusive is Tequila Works’ narrative adventure Gylt; like the rest of the studio’s work it is competently made and charming, but it is no system seller.
In a Reddit AMA the week before launch Andrey Doronichev, Stadia’s director of product, explained that Google likes to start with the basics and build out from there. “YouTube started with ‘watch video’,” he explained. “For Stadia it’s ‘play the game on your biggest screen’.” That’s fair enough, but all of the above becomes even more frustrating given the fact that Stadia works. It works wonderfully well, in fact, albeit with the caveat that we are one of a handful of media given early access to a platform that is hardly operating at scale, and we suspect a few cutbacks in resolution. But the first time we fire up Destiny 2 in a browser tab is a thrill, and switching between screens – from Chrome to Chromecast to Pixel then back again – is as simple as firing up the app on the screen in question, your game session appearing within seconds. While we’ll leave the frame- and pixel-counting to the professionals, the only tool we need to assess Stadia’s technology is our many hours of Destiny experience. It is not quite flawless – there’s a frame or two of delay, surely, and it’s prettier on PC – but it is perfectly playable, and quite beautiful.
How much of that is due to the low initial number of users, we’re not sure. But we doubt that, by the time you read this and Stadia is in the wild, those figures will have skyrocketed. This does not feel like a platform launch. It’s merely a proof of concept, the soft launch of a basic paid beta. It gives Google a theoretical advantage over the competition – over Microsoft’s xCloud, over PS5 and the next Xbox, over whatever Amazon is cooking up. But much more work is required if that advantage is to count for anything.
Chromecast is the only way to play on a big screen, at least without hooking a PC directly to it