So, Stadia finally met its demise last week. After an unsuccessful launch with general apathy from the audience, there’s an argument that the platform was doomed right from the very beginning – despite Google itself investing a gigantic amount of cash into the hardware and various publishing deals. Perhaps the writing was on the wall when Stadia shut down its own development studio, while the logical evolution of the platform – as a ‘white label’ cloud system that could be used by publishers – wasn’t really compatible with the Linux/Vulkan foundation. Features failed to materialise (remember being able to access a game state by sharing a link?) while there were always doubts about the 10.7 teraflops of GPU power. If graphics performance was so high, how come Xbox One X at 6TF produced superior results? Was that GPU actually virtualised over two users? I’d love to know for sure.
The thing is, as many have stated, Stadia had much to commend it in terms of actually delivering a decent enough streaming experience – markedly better than xCloud in terms of quality. Regardless, the system did not attract much interest and it’s time to face realities about the actual viability of cloud-based platforms in general.
Let’s start with the technological arguments first. Put simply, if the platform holder is not responsible for the quality of the experience from beginning to end, there will always be problems. I’ve tried Stadia and xCloud on a 30Mbps fibre connection – and they simply did not work. I upgraded to Starlink and that didn’t work either. Only now, with the arrival of fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) and gigabit internet does it actually work for me. My experience won’t be the case for everyone, but the point is, there’s no way to ‘debug’ it and make it work. There are other technological limitations too in a bandwidth-constrained scenario – if I’m playing Stadia and someone else in the home decides to download a game or even just watch Netflix, there are going to be issues.
