Healthy Skepticism of Google Stadia
Nice option, but it’s not a PC. Not even close
Google Stadia is a nice option for a niche segment of gamers, such as minimalists who live in tiny homes, or kids whose parents don’t want the hassle of the hardware that comes with games. But that’s all cloud gaming should be, or at least can be at this point—another option for consumers. Gaming on local hardware doesn’t come with all the latency and packet loss issues that cloud gaming does, not to mention the fact that if your Internet provider puts a data cap on your plan, gaming on Stadia is going to suck up all your available data, and “hello” overuse charges or throttling.
Yet I can’t help but feel that Google is treating Stadia as though it’s going to change gaming as we know it. In a recent interview with Edge Magazine, Google’s VP of engineering, Madj Bakar, made a bold claim that Google thinks “in a year or two we’ll have games that are running faster and feel more responsive in the cloud than they do locally,” and it will be because Google will have perfected a type of machine learning that predicts what button you’ll press before you press it—theoretically.
I can’t help but be extremely skeptical of Google’s claims. Fast response times are a necessity in the middle of an intense shoot-out or when stringing together a complicated combo of moves in a fighting game. How will it predict what I want to say to another character in a game like
isStrange?
You only have to cast your mind back to a decade ago, and you’ll remember that many people were thinking PC gaming was on the brink of extinction, but look where we are now. Only a massive restructuring of the world’s Internet is going to result in cloud gaming being on the same level as PC or console gaming—and that’s not happening any time soon.