130 games in the first year after a console launch is a good number by historical standards. The problem for Stadia is that this time Sony and Microsoft are not starting from 0 thanks to backwards compatibility.
There’s only two issues for me on Stadia so far.
- Game selection is lacking. Pretty self-explanatory here.
- 30fps sucks for the games I’ve tested so far. Both AC Odyssey and Borderlands 3 are soooooooooooo much better at 60fps on my PC playing off the local hardware.
I get that if Steam or GoG go away—whatever the DRM situation is or isn’t for particular games on particular services—I will likely lose a lot of games I either can’t or didn’t archive. Net result of any of those storefronts shutting down is a huge hit to a library of games I’ve paid for.
So with that acknowledgment, I still feel considerably more wary about the same situation for Stadia. If it was a subscription service things would be different, but “purchasing” individual games without even the pretense of thinking I could back them up if Stadia shuts down, combined with Google’s track record on projects and services they lose interest in, is a pretty strong deterrent for me buying any games in Stadia.
Do you feel the same way Telefrog, or have you just made peace with that trade off?
I agree with this - I had no problem dropping 99cents to grab Borderlands 3, because that was an amazing price and serves as a great testbed for Stadia performance and functionality. But I’m leery of buying something like Cyberpunk. I also like to pretend that someday I’ll have a PC that can play it well, and at that point I wouldn’t want it locked away on a platform where I can’t run it locally.
No. I really don’t like 30fps if I have an option to play at 60fps (or better) even if that costs more. Even stuff like the slight visible shudder in a turn-based strategy game as I scroll around a map bothers me.
I guess I meant if they addressed your two issues so far, would this rise up as another concern for you, or would you be all in on Stadia if they had a huge library to purchase from and reliable 60fps?
Free tier is only 30 fps?
No - I believe most games offer a 60fps option at 1080p resolution. 4k 60fps is locked to the paid tier.
It was a bunch of random tips from /r/stadia some of which were probably placebo, and unfortunately I didn’t track. Some stuff to make the mouse feel better in Destiny 2, Chrome flags to try, disabling VSYNC in Chrome. Though forcing VP9 and 4k (and verifying it’s working) with the extension is the most important. (The video stream should say it’s at 4k even if your monitor is 1440 or 1080.)
Other things I remember trying, turning of Windows DPI scaling and HDR. Try with Microsoft Edge and if that works better than Chrome, Chrome isn’t working right so it might be an unrelated extension causing latency too.
Those are my currently existing issues with Stadia. I do have one more reason to not go all-in on Stadia, and it’s similar to yours. My other reservation is that I frankly don’t trust Google to support Stadia in the long term due to the way Google drops projects like hot rocks with little notice if they underperform. And I assume the numbers for Stadia aren’t great so far based on the way no one talks about it.
It’s kinda funny. We are going out of town to my inlaws for christmas, so this could theoretically be perfect for me since I’ll be away from my gaming desktop.
Except my in laws have a bandwidth cap that they get close to most months, so… that’s not going to work.
This is my other big concern with streaming games in general. I’m lucky enough to have no cap at the moment. If I move though, chances are VERY high I’d end up somewhere with one, and that would just kill it.
@Quaro - Thanks for the tips. I had enabled VP9, but didn’t realize I should be forcing 4k.
Just thinking here: what could Google do to alleviate the worry that Stadia will shut down and wasted the money of anyone who bought a $60 game? Let’s say that they know they have a bad reputation for killing projects, but they know this one really is going to be different. (I don’t know this.)
For me, I think it’d be news confirming bigger, longer-term investments in game development. I am concerned by the stalled progress and dysfunction on the original studio side as well as the deals with outside studios.
I’d also feel better if I knew I could get a refund or Google credit if my purchased game were to become unavailable within a year of purchase (or longer, but a year seems reasonable.)
If you were just using it to stream stuff from your Ubisoft+ sub, you wouldn’t own any games to worry about :)
But that’s what I use Amazon Luna for!
Ah, it was probably Luna I was thinking of. Hard to keep up :)
Are you actually using Luna? How is it?
New with pro - Cthulhu saves Christmas.
Free for everyone - Crayta. Gotta grab the “Deluxe” version if you have it from pro. Store doesn’t have a search feature (???), so have fun finding it.
New with Pro:
- Airy and the Secret of Seasons
- El Hijo: Wild West Tale
- F1 2020
- Figment
- Hotline Miami