Stadia Due This Fall
THE GAMES INDUSTRY is about to get a good shaking: Google’s Stadia game streaming service is due to go live in November. Stadia Pro at $9.99 a month gives access to the full library of games, while a special Founders Package at $129.99 gives you three months’ subscription, a Stadia controller, and a Chromecast Ultra. Sometime next year there will be a free version, called Stadia Base. This will limit you to running games at 1080p, and you don’t get your pick from the library, although you can buy individual titles. The launch games list is short—just 32, with no exclusives—but they are all top titles (Balder’sGateIII anyone?), and there are a lot more in the pipeline.
The exact resolutions you’ll be able to use effectively will depend on the speed of your Internet connection. Google says you’ll need 10Mb/s for 720p, double that for 1080p, and 35Mb/s for 4K. If you have a data cap, you could be in trouble, too. You also need low latency; critical for gaming, and doubly critical for multiplayer games.
Stadia’s rival, Microsoft’s xCloud, is also due a public trial. The difference is that Stadia offers more than running a game on the cloud; it’s a development platform, too. xCloud is, put crudely, a rack of console motherboards playing games; we haven’t really left the Xbox environment. Google’s Stadia is more ambitious—a developer could potentially make just one version of its game that’ll run pretty much anywhere with a decent broadband connection at 4K. Potentially, Stadia could kill not only the idea of owning games, but owning the means to run them independently, too.