hey everybody it's the one from tested and today I'm going to be reviewing
Google's stadia it's finally out this is the found roots Edition which is out
this week for those who pre-ordered it and I've been using it for about the
past week playing a selection of their launch titles and using it in a variety
of conditions to see what the performance and the feature set for
cloud gaming at least from Google's perspective is all about because I'm
sure some of you have read or heard this is this launch is not without some
interesting launch conditions let's call that so if you're not familiar stadia
was announced earlier this year something that Google has been working
on for quite a long time now and it's not necessarily their console because
it's not real console hardware or a game platform it's it's a cloud gaming
service they have data centers that they've set up they've built these
server blades with very high-end PC hardware a ton of potential compute an
order of magnitude more potential power than when you get on like an Xbox one S
and the ability to then render those games remotely and stream them over
Wi-Fi or over Ethernet connection onto your pixel phone your laptop or
Chromebook when your Chrome browser or onto a TV using a chromecast ultra in
theoretically as high fidelity up to a 4k HDR with iPhone 1 surround-sound and
as low latency as you would be able to expect playing you know almost any game
in the home the idea is that you would not notice it now we went into a deep
dive at Google to chat with their engineers about the kind of streaming
technology that allows this to happen and encourage you to watch that I'm not
gonna dive too much into that compression and latency technology today
but we will talk about the experience and there are a couple of tiers to
stadia a lot of people have been confused about what you buy or what you
get what's launching right now is the
founders Edition so that's the paid tier to state and your pay
essentially ten dollars a month and you do get a couple months free with the
founders edition the hardware that you buy to get access to the service and
with that you do get one free game at launch you get destiny too but then you
also then have the ability to pay for games full price games that you would go
buy on PC or other consoles there will be a free tier 2 stadia coming next year
and that will be again you buy the games you won't get the free game like destiny
or whatever games they announced in the future and your streaming quality will
be limited to 1080 so like might make more sense for a mobile play or playing
on a laptop but if you want the best quality you have a 55 or 65 inch 4k HDR
TV at home you might want to then look at the paid monthly version of a stadia
well you're not buying game console hardware with stadia you're not buying a
300 or $400 game console or gaming PC that you put in your living room or your
office there is the opportunity to buy some hardware to make stadium work so
the foundation comes with this controller and you can buy the
controller a la carte in the future and the controller is really great it's it's
designed really well has button parity with with all the major consoles so you
got your triggers your shoulder buttons you had a good d-pad two analog sticks
that again feel really familiar if you're used to playing on an Xbox and
some custom buttons for accessing things like google assist in and sharing videos
right the center as well as a center stadia button and it's over charged over
USB or data runs over USB right now on mobile site it runs on pixel phones and
this right here is what they're calling the Google the claw attachment design
internally this doesn't come with the final edition it will be sold
exclusively on the Google store and it's a really nice clip really well designed
as well you clip it onto the controller right here and exposes the headphone
jack your stadia button as well as the USB C port and then phone's can snap in
right there the grip does for example this pixel 3xl you have to put it
off-center because the grip would press on your volume buttons but you again you
plug in the USB C cable right here and you then have the ability to control
your game on your phone and this is really nice ergonomic design on a TV
side if you want to play stating games on a TV at launch will only work with
the chromecast 4k the chromecast ultra and in fact at very launch it only works
with the chromecast Ultra that ship with a Founders Edition and other chromecast
ultros will need a firmware patch the version that comes with the foundation
has the Ethernet port right here which is nice so you want the lowest latency
you're gonna want to connect that over your internet connection and not just
use Wi-Fi but of course ideas that you can play in almost
places as you have Google Chrome or chromecast products so you can also play
this on a laptop or PC in your Chrome browser with a keyboard mouse or plugged
in USB gamepad so let's talk about performance now when I did my hands on
with the stadia at Google's headquarters I was using their internet the part of
the best possible case scenario not a really good time with the performance
and latency and image quality and their demo session but taking it to home I was
surprised to find that it was basically the same
I do have gigabit access over sonic internet at home and the latency on my
TV using the chromecast and using the controller here was really really good
like going doing an a/b test between that and local Xbox one
it was almost indistinguishable playing a 4k game on the TV if you go right up
to the TV and you try to look at the anti-aliasing and look at some
compression you may notice some of that if you're going right up to the TV but
at a standard distance away from the TV of about 10 15 feet no problems with the
quality the quality even looks better on a mobile phone of course that's running
at the phone's resolution in case of the pixel 3xl that's 1080p and I was just
flabbergasted I love looking at these high-end console games and PC games like
Tomb Raider rendered on this phone because my brain just doesn't believe it
works right because I'm waiting for the phone to overheat I'm waiting for the
battery drained down the fans aren't nothing like makes me feel like this is
watching a youtube video it looks like it's locally rendered I'm like pixel
peeping and trying to see if I can see dithering but it just looks great on the
mobile device the thing that doesn't work so well on the mobile device is
sometimes the UI a lot of these games are designed for play on big screen TVs
or designed for play on a computer screen a 27-inch monitor 24 inch monitor
and when scaled down to a six inch phone I am finding that the UI isn't adapted
to be bigger for the phone I am squinting to read the
text a lot of the prompts that pop up so it's not optimized for this size of
display and I did find myself wanting to tap the screen to hit dialogue buttons
when it says press a to close this one or okay I want to hit that okay button
with my finger but developers for these games haven't made them touch compatible
no don't know if that would be possible to do so because when you play this on a
PC on the Chrome browser keyboard mouse is activated so I'm wondering could they
just activate touch as an analog to a mouse click for example I know I know
Mel touching doesn't work I still find myself regularly trying to touch the
screen on this phone as I'm playing games on stadia the places where I did
find the most noticeable compression or deer the ring ended up being on a web
browser and on the PC screen and you know you do need a decent internet
connection to make this work every time you load a game there will be
a check on your connection so home Wi-Fi and our office Wi-Fi which is obviously
not the best Wi-Fi thanks Comcast still stream fine but places like Airport free
Wi-Fi that's not good actually being able to work and won't even try to run
the game on poor Wi-Fi connections so your experience may vary right now it
won't even work over mobile connections and it will consume a fair amount of
bandwidth if you're at home on a 4k stream for example you may get up to 15
gigs per hour of download for just the video streaming but of course if you're
talking about of game like Red Dead Redemption 2 which is already gonna be
over a hundred gig download perhaps that is a little bit of a trade-off and some
of the advantage of course of stadia is that you're not having to download or
update not only the game but also the hardware system the promise is that over
time Google will update their server Harbor so you're always going to be
getting the cutting-edge some of those benefits are supposed to also be
immediately noticeable now because they're using fast storage but game load
times are still here I'd say they're comparable to having a
SSD on your system but you are waiting for load screens that was a little bit
surprised I thought the promise would be that games would be optimized to load
almost instantaneously and that's something that console makers are
putting into their next-generation console designs so this definitely
unless they adapt that to work for those games on stadia feels more like a
current gen console situation less than some magical next gen immediate loading
console game I talked about the UI and some of the adaptations that the
developers have to make for their games to work on stadia and there's a fair bit
under the hood it seems that developers will have to tune for example you can't
just graphic settings in games you have gamma settings and brightness settings
but it's not the PC game experience where you can toggle between resolutions
or anti-aliasing none of that is transparent to the user there's also
some back-end work done to make sure the savegame
works with stadia between different instances but you don't get access to
the file data or mod ability and that's still something to be determined how
stadia will work with mods it's something they're aware of but they just
haven't revealed to users just yet it really feels like a lot of the UI work
is adapted to make work for big screens I think it looks really great on a big
65 inch TV and it looks really good on you know 27-inch computer monitor as
well the game the graphics look great on a mobile phone and it's amazing for it
to see it running on a Chromebook but the UI elements aren't perfectly
scaled for those sized screens at this point I don't know how much work
developers have to do so make that custom work to make that look a little
bit better but the idea is that you're supposed to be able to swap between
devices and I was curious how that swapping would work so there is you know
in the stadium if you back out of a game or of your pause a game and you load up
the web browser you can say resume state and you have a basically a grace period
if you turn off your chromecast and you're then moving on to your office and
loading stadia up on your office computer you
about a five to ten minute grace period where it's gonna save that exact state
any longer than that then the server basically to reverse to a save game and
you have to load the game from the main menu so it's not quite instantaneous nor
is it quite as persistent as I'd hope so that idea that in the future you'll be
able to pause the game in your living room jump on you know jump in a lift or
a rideshare and play the game on your phone and then and then play it at the
airport and then play it on airplane that's not gonna be anytime soon
what's also not available at launch may come down allowed are some features that
Google made announcements for when they announced stadia earlier this year and
that includes crowd play the ability to watch a youtube video of someone playing
their game of city alive click join multiplayer and join into that game
immediately in their browser that sounds like really cool potential for a cloud
gaming not available at launch nor is State share the ability to share where
you are in your save game with someone seamlessly so they can jump into where
you are and you guys can play you know asynchronously
but have that state sharing of save games not available nor is stream
connect the ability for people to take a bunch of different streams of people
playing stadia games and then composite them in some type of UI again lots of
cool opportunities that take advantage of cloud gaming but not ready at this
point right now there's even just trying to get parity with the console gaming
experience and at launch they don't even have things like achievements or the
friend pass just yet what I would also love and I think would help stadia is
ability for them to enable some type of demo mode something that would allow
people to try games out maybe play the first 10 or 15 minutes of a game begins
used that cloud streaming service and then that would maybe entice people to
then buy the full version of the game that's what I would like to see come to
cloud gaming in general but perhaps what's most disappointing about stadia
at launch is the available games lists Google put out lists of all the titles
and all developers they're working with and there are some notable admissions
that hopefully would be out by the end of 2019 but at launch they're just 12
games yes there's the destiny to game that ever
gets for free and that's important because that's gonna be a closed
ecosystem for multiplayer destiny to players on stadia can only play with
other destiny to players on the stadia but the other games you can buy right
now you know the flagships include mortal kombat 11 shadow of the Tomb
Raider the latest Assassin's Creed Odyssey and most notably probably Red
Dead Redemption 2 is probably and that's last year's a flagship title that's
probably the best highest quality game that takes advantage of the fact that
you don't that download a 100 gigabyte game file to get it playing immediately
and I think the games that they've promised coming down the line things
like do maternal and cyberpunk 2077 that's gonna really push the limits of
the latency and quality you know the gay a game like cyberpunk is gonna look
amazing and it's probably a massive game file that could potentially take huge
advantage of clouds streaming and a game like dual maternal twitch shooter that
is gonna push the limits of the low latency which will vary for different
people in the launch countries for stadia there are also considerations
like I mentioned data caps you know streaming if you have a Gigabit Ethernet
connection chances are you probably have unlimited data so using up to 15
gigabytes per hour streaming 4k HDR 5.1 audio video isn't gonna be a problem but
if you have a cap data connection you know 1080p streaming will take up to ten
gigs per hour even 720p connection will take up to four point five gigs an hour
that can add up but it doesn't bode well for when Google and other cloud
streaming cloud gaming services inevitably want people to be using this
on the go with their mobile internet connections with their Verizon and 80t
mobile plans and they're gonna be the costs associated with that and that's
what they're thinking is this is a long term play google says they're in this
for the long haul they've built up an internal game development studio to make
games which we won't see the fruits of for maybe several years they haven't
shown anything for that yeah and I'm not worried about necessarily the technology
I know that Google as the data centers they there they are
the right people to be investing in cloud streaming and both Sony Microsoft
Neiman Nvidia they've already invested in cloud streaming that feels less like
a proof-of-concept technology we even saw working to some extent years ago
with online and more of an edit ability but my fears of stadia is gonna be the
game support and one how difficult will be for developers and publishers to port
their games to stadia you know they knew this launch was coming and even then
they only have these 12 titles at launch things aren't ready why is that the case
is it really that much more work on the backend to adapt these games I
understand it's not gonna be a one button solution to make a PC game work
on the stadia platform but if it's gonna be a lot of work that means a lot of
costs and so my other fear is that publishers may be scared away not only
by that cost but the unproven market that is stadia and cloud gaming in
general it's that chicken and egg problem you know publishers may not want
to invest and spend the money making their games work on this platform if
there aren't enough users out there and there aren't gonna be enough user out
there if there aren't enough compelling reasons or content to make people adopt
this platform and at launch right now where they're already asking people to
spend ten dollars a month on this or paid invest 130 dollars on the founders
edition there's a not a lot to make me convinced that there's gonna be a big
enough community to convince more publishers to jump on board now Google
has a lot of money they can invest in the technology they can invest in the
game studios maybe they could also invest in ways to get people into this
platform for free and so the next tier you know the free version of CD I think
will be a lot of the proving grounds for this service and for stadia in the first
year of launch that's coming in 2020 so in 2019 right now November as the
stadia has launched it really feels like more of a beta launch I wish Google
would be more transparent about that you know not all the features are there and
yeah this like other Google products will have more feature rollouts but if
it's something that they announced back in March and have promised throughout
the months and they're calling this a lot
that's just not acceptable because this is not YouTube or Google Docs you know
this is supposed to compete with PC game with Steam with epic the games store
with Xbox with PlayStation and those consoles those platforms don't launch
with almost half of their feature set not there with the promise of the
feature set coming and with this paltry of a launch lineup so consider this an
evaluation of school stadia beta in my mind it's still beta at launch and we'll
come back and reevaluate it a couple months down the line when there are more
opportunities playing more games when the free tier comes out and when that
community builds thanks for watching if you have other questions about clouds
streaming about stadia please feel free to post them in the comments below and
we'll try to address them as best we can and we'll see you next time