So. Google canceled another product. Must be a day in the week. However, with Stadia, they have for once done it properly and doing it was not a bad idea. What with Stadia itself being a bad idea.
Stating the obvious is a bit of a running gag on these little articles of mine, so let’s not break traditions here: cloud gaming doesn’t work. At least, not in any meaningful way to get a return of investment on it. As great as your bandwidth is, and as efficient as you make it, the laws of physics will forever bring appreciable lag to it. And that’s with ideal conditions. Suffice to say, the amount of people whose internet connection is not perfect is (almost) everyone on the planet.
Stadia smelled bad from the start, what with their claims that they would achieve “negative latency” in just a couple of years and that lag would be a thing of the past thanks to their ability to predict what you’d do in-game before you did it. I’m sure that some in Mountain View were completely sure this was the case. As the reaction to the claims made it clear, everyone else thought it was yet another example of the weird mindset that brought us the Juicero.
But, all things considered, Stadia was not such a bad idea once it got off the ground. Especially since its lifespan coincided with the perfect storm to ruin a new gamer’s entry into the space, what with silicon suddenly becoming essentially nonexistent and the only way to get most hardware that would allow you to game being through a scalper who would happily rid you of a multiple of the actual retail value of the product.
Suddenly $10/month plus whatever they would charge for games seemed like a good idea, especially since the technology means that you could play anywhere with an internet connection. And therein lied the issues. Because everyone who was also forced to deal with a myriad of videoconferences will tell you that even the best connections on the planet will occasionally turn into a blocky streaky mess. All it takes is something else deciding it needs that bandwidth.
The situation is different now, with the GPU market plummeting back into (some semblance of) sanity and more availability of most tech products not called Raspberry Pi. Even if our money is worth nowhere near as much as it used to be, getting a local gaming system is easier and cheaper. But as far as cloud services are concerned, you still have the laws of physics to fight against, not to mention the uncertainty of the future of the platform and having to pay a subscription to play (although everyone with a console can relate to that particular hell).
With that against them and the well-documented culture at Google not rewarding constant maintenance and development over what thanks to Will Smith is called “New Hotness”, it’s unsurprising that Stadia will be going away soon, but it’s really good that they decided to give everyone a refund for everything they spent on it, demonstrating a level of “Don’t be evil” that is rarely shown by the company that used to proudly carry that banner.
It almost makes the tinge of the dislike button going away disappear. Almost.
