Blog:Paprika's Thoughts On Google Stadia

We all were subject to the launch of the Google Stadia a few days ago and it's been...pretty bad to say the least. To be honest, even when the console was announced I was having mixed feelings about it because of the concept of cloud streaming (no thanks to my godawful experience with PlayStation Now until Sony sought to improve it) meaning that you don't own a digital or physical copy of the game and that is played entirely through an internet connection. Now I get that while many gamers and users on this wiki like myself, Grust and Vicious187 want to preserve physical media some gamers would rather be able to jump right into the game because you've been waiting months for it and stuff but the Stadia is only cloud streaming and doesn't run offline, meaning that if the Stadia's servers are ever shut down in the future then the games are lost forever. This is why physical media has become even more valuable than they were in the old days because even when the console is discontinued you can still the play the game as long as you have a copy of it, which clearly won't be the case for Stadia and it just gives people one more reason not to buy it..

Going back on the servers they ran awfully and aren't very dedicated. You'd think that knowing Google is the 3rd most valuable company in the world that they would be able to afford and run a much more dedicated server (then again, this is their first attempt at gaming hardware). The Stadia itself isn't built very generously in terms of streaming capabilities so that means it heavily relies on your internet connection, naturally when we're at a point where this sort of thing isn't quite possible yet it is very data hungry and can rack up bills easily. I feel like the main reason why the Stadia runs so terribly is because Google Chrome is required to use it and, well, we all know how much ChromeOS sucks dingleberries and gobbles up CPU and RAM like a dragon going through a growth spurt. It also feels like a sign of laziness and/or rushing because Google didn't even bother making a dedicated StadiaOS or something from scratch made specifically to run games, which could have made the performance better than what it is now.

Now let's talk about the launch titles. Google clearly lacked knowledge with developers and gamers because a portion of the titles are pretty abysmal like NBA 2K20, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Destiny 2, The Crew 2 and Wolfenstein: Youngblood. Stadia doesn't even have any exclusives or new "Console Seller" games (Gylt is decent but that's just about it) at launch that would make people want to buy Stadia to play that game. As pointed out by other reviewers like YongYea some of the titles are good but these are all games that people have played before and have already been reviewed. Google doesn't even seem to be interested in opening up or buying a game development studio for themselves so that they can support the Stadia with exclusives either.

Stadia's future third party support also worries me because of how hard it flopped and the architecture seems to be wonky and hard to work with because some of the games like Red Dead Redemption 2 look and run worse on Stadia than they do on other consoles or PC. I know nowadays developers would rather make a game that sells but when the console already has PR that isn't looking so good (from false advertising key features that weren't at launch and people who pre-ordered Founder's codes not getting them on launch day) or how terribly the games run on it then what's the point when the console itself already has terrible sales, even for it's first few days?

To make a long story short, it just feels like Google didn't take enough time and care with the Stadia's development and they tried bringing a supposed part of the future to the present when we just aren't there yet.

Oh yeah and this costs $130 with a $10 monthly fee, along with $60 for AAA games and all those damn data bills you get for using this thing. Google, do us all a favor and stick to smartphones.

