Stayed up way later than I meant to last night messing with Google Stadia, which officially launched yesterday, November 19th. I've been half-following this thing since Google announced it back at GDC in March, and I'll admit the pitch got me: no console, no download, just click a link and you're playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on a Chromebook. That's the dream, right? Well. Sort of.
I paid the $129 for the Founder's Edition back when preorders opened, which got me the Chromecast Ultra, the Night Blue controller, three months of Stadia Pro, and a copy of Destiny 2: The Collection. Box showed up Monday. I didn't open it until last night because, predictably, I was busy.
First problem: the controller doesn't just pair over Bluetooth like literally every other controller you own. It talks to your WiFi network directly, which means the very first thing you do out of the box is plug it into your phone with a USB cable and walk it through your WiFi password inside the Stadia app. Fine, I get why they did it that way, lower latency and all that, but it's an extra ten minutes of setup nobody warns you about, and mine failed twice before it stuck. My router is nothing exotic either, just a normal Netgear thing sitting in the hallway closet.
Once it connected, the actual streaming was better than I expected, honestly. I fired up Mortal Kombat 11 and there was maybe a quarter-second of input lag, noticeable if you're looking for it but not something that ruined the fights. Then I switched to Destiny 2 and the picture quality dipped for a good ten minutes, went kind of soft and blocky, before it settled back down. My internet is a fairly ordinary 150mbps cable connection, nothing special, so I don't think it's just me.
The bigger annoyance, and the one that's going to bug people more than latency ever will, is that Stadia Pro doesn't actually give you a library of games. You get maybe a couple of freebies a month and everything else you still have to buy full price, same as you would on a PS4. I paid full price for Destiny 2: The Collection as part of the bundle, sure, but if I want to play Tomb Raider I'm buying it again on Stadia even though I already own it on Steam. That's the part that feels off to me. I understand the streaming infrastructure costs money, but calling it "Pro" and then handing you a subscription that's basically just a discount club and a couple of freebies feels like a step short of what people were picturing.
Game selection at actual launch is thin too, something like a dozen titles you can play right this second, with more supposedly rolling in before the end of the year. No Chrome desktop achievements, no state sharing, none of the "watch a streamer click a link and start playing instantly" stuff Google demoed on stage back at GDC. That feature is apparently coming later. It always is.
None of this is a disaster. The core tech, the actual business of running a game on a server somewhere and beaming it to my TV with playable latency, mostly works, and that alone is more than I expected out of a first day cloud gaming service. I remember OnLive back in like 2010 and this blows that out of the water. But "mostly works" and "worth $129 plus a monthly fee plus full game prices" are two very different bars, and right now Stadia's only cleared the first one.
I'll keep the Founder's Edition running through the free Pro months at least, mostly out of curiosity, and I might write something up once the promised feature list actually ships instead of just getting mentioned in a keynote. For now my controller is charging on the kitchen counter and I'm going back to my Switch, which, for the record, has never once asked me to type my WiFi password into it.