Despite a rocky launch, Google thinks Stadia has a bright future

A week later, it’s safe to say Google Stadia’s launch didn’t satisfy the gaming service’s numerous skeptics. 

While the underlying tech garnered high marks from our review and others, some publications like The Washington Post had serious problems getting games to work properly. 

Despite everything, Stadia’s director of games, Jack Buser, told Mashable in an interview the day after launch that he was proud of the product. 

“To think that we, yesterday, launched in 14 countries and we have our founders now playing games on the service in their homes, and reporting back to us on their experience, is the most gratifying thing I’ve done in my professional career,” Buser said.

Google may be content with Stadia’s early progress, but that hasn’t been the case for plenty of folks who bought into the early adopter-focused Founders Edition program. Stadia was initially sold as a way to play games in 4K resolution and 60 frames per second without expensive hardware, but not every game has been up to par, according to detailed technical analysis from Digital Foundry.

Unfortunate as they are, latency and occasional video artifacting are to be expected for a service that pushes video games through the cloud. But titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 (on Chromecast) and Shadow of the Tomb Raider (with “resolution mode” enabled) can be locked to 30 frames per second. Additionally, Destiny 2 isn’t truly rendered at 4K, but is rather upscaled from a base render of 1440p.

In layman’s terms, some of the heaviest hitters in the Stadia launch lineup don’t look as sharp or run as smoothly as players believed they would. Google said in a statement to 9to5Google that things can and should improve over time. Buser acknowledged that things aren’t perfect just yet, but stressed that visuals should get better as time goes on.

“Is the fidelity of the launch lineup the ultimate fidelity of what can be delivered on Stadia? No,” Buser said. “We are going to continually evolve over time, developers will continually get more and more familiar with the architecture and the hardware we’re delivering.”

Stadia is an unusual gaming platform and, perhaps appropriately, had an unusual launch. The only people who can play Stadia right now are those who bought the $130 Founders or Premiere Edition packages, leaving anyone who wants to try it for free to wait until a wider rollout at an unspecified date next year.

Between the lack of Assistant support, the inability to buy games straight from the Chromecast, the lack of an achievement system, and other missing features, it’s easy to wonder why Google launched Stadia in this state at all. There is a Google Assistant button on the controller that still doesn’t do anything yet. 

Beyond all that, Tequila Works’ GYLT is the only exclusive game on the platform right now, leaving early adopters with few options that don’t already exist elsewhere. The only other unique experiences to be had on Stadia are additions within games themselves, such as a 40-player racing mode in GRID.

Whether you believe it or not, to hear Google tell it, this is the way it was always supposed to happen. Buser said Google’s content strategy from all the way back in 2016 is consistent with what Stadia offers now. The plan was to offer big-name titles from a wide swath of genres and countries along with some exclusive experiences, and Buser said he feels Stadia has delivered on that so far.

“If you go back and look at the last four or five generations of game consoles, this an extremely strong launch lineup,” Buser said. “We couldn’t be more proud of our partners.”

As for Stadia’s strange two-part launch, Buser explained it by pointing out a lack of precedent for what Google is trying to do. To be clear, other companies have tried to launch game streaming services before; OnLive crashed and burned almost a decade ago, PlayStation Now hasn’t made much of a dent, and Microsoft’s xCloud just entered a testing phase in October.

Stadia isn’t the first time anyone has tried this, but a lack of prior success by anyone else could help explain its distinctive approach.

“There was no playbook, right?” Buser said. “We looked at how consoles were launched in the past, we’ve looked at other entertainment mediums and how they’re launched, but Stadia is really different from anything the world has ever seen before.”

“There was no playbook…”

For Stadia, as with other new gaming platforms, the longview matters more than the here-and-now. In a year’s time, Stadia will compete with two new, high-powered consoles in the PlayStation 5 and Xbox’s Project Scarlett. If Google is to be believed, Stadia will have more games, more features, and work on more devices by then. Critically, it won’t cost at least $400 like a new console might.

We’ll see if Stadia is ready to compete with the biggest names in gaming hardware next fall, but Buser expressed confidence that it will be better than it is now. After all, one theoretical advantage of streaming is that Google should be able to just improve the hardware on their end without making users buy anything new.

“You’ll see us start to deploy creative experiences from the world’s best game developers that would simply be impossible on a network appliance in your living room like a game console or PC,” Buser said.

“And even a year from now, we’ll still be on the journey because Stadia is the kind of platform that just keeps going and going and going and going.”