The Three Levels of Google Stadia

Level 1: What is Stadia?

Imagine getting home from a long day of work. You leave your things at the foot of the door and collapse onto your couch. Shoes off, you prop your feet on the coffee table and turn on the TV. The show you have been watching is just getting interesting, and you can’t wait to see what happens next.

Now, imagine that instead of a show, you start up a game. No expensive console or PC. No downloads or discs. Just a seamless online gaming experience.

That’s the possibility Google Stadia wants you to have, but it is not quite there yet.

Slated for launch on Nov. 19, Google Stadia is both a marketplace for video games, and a platform that allows you to stream and play games through Google’s cloud service. You can play on a television screen (as long as you have a Chromecast), a computer (as long as your using Chrome), or a phone (as long as it is a Pixel).

At launch, the hardware has a $130 price tag. This includes a sleek limited-edition controller and a Chromecast Ultra, and three months of the premium tier subscription, which nets you free games every month.

Google Stadia’s biggest asset is its accessibility for people interested in gaming, but who don’t own any type of console or dedicated PC. Consoles are a big investment, running upwards of $300, and a computer needs to have a good graphics card, a CPU and a monitor to run games at their full potential. Google Stadia wants to do away with the commitment of a console, instead letting you play on (almost) any device that has an internet connection.

Level 2: Who’s it for?

“It has the potential to be really groundbreaking,” says Eric Allen, Associate Chair of Interactive Design and Game Development at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Allen expressed his enthusiasm for Stadia while sitting at a table with Dungeons and Dragons figurines. Students that are part of the game club that he oversees were playing Dragon Ball Z close by. He himself grew up playing games and is disappointed that, while they are increasingly mainstream, people struggle to see their potential.

“I like to play games with my little cousin, but I don’t have a [console] myself,” says Isabella Giordanelli, a less-frequent gamer. She takes care of her younger cousin on the weekends and video games are a way they can relate to each other. It keeps the boy entertained, and she also enjoys it herself. Giordanelli grew up with a console but fell out of gaming in high school. She sometimes plays mobile games to relax after work. The more she heard about Google Stadia, the more keen she seemed on the idea. “It’s great that there are no discs, that it happens over the internet.”

“It will be interesting to see what happens after the launch,” says Allen, who is confident that when the free service drops in 2020, more people are going to give it a try. “We’ll have to wait and see,” he says with a confident smile.

Anthony Lopez spends most of his free time in front of his TV, playing video games. Currently, he uses one of the first models of the PlayStation 4, but he’s owned the three generations that have preceded it. He has more than 30 games in his combined physical and digital collection.

The appeal to newcomers that Allen is particularly impressed by is the prospect of being able to stream games despite hardware, relying only on an internet connection. Yet the internet speed requirements are lofty, with a recommended minimum of 10 Megabytes per second (Mbps) allowing only a 720 resolution.

“I already lag on the games I normally play,” says Lopez. In his household just outside of Orlando, the connection speed is 25 Mbps. When sharing it with his two siblings and his mother, the internet connection is not reliable enough to stream consistently.

When Lopez is playing, he uses a headset with a microphone to communicate with others in online games. Between rounds, he puts his controller down to pet his dog behind the ears. Gaming is prominent in his day-to-day life, and he factors game purchases in with his other expenses.

“If you really have to buy the games, I don’t see what the point is,” Lopez says of the Stadia. “It doesn’t even have that many…”

Stadia’s library of 12 games at launch is less than impressive. There are some great ones, like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Red Dead Redemption 2, with fourteen others expected to come to the service by the end of 2019. The only one that is truly included with the Stadia is Destiny 2, but other still carry their price tag.

“It’d be cool to play [console] games on my phone…” says Kyrle Luth, who owns a PlayStation4, Xbox One, a Nintendo DS and a PC he uses to stream on occasion. Luth walks around his apartment with his headset on, talking with his friends while he makes dinner. He wondered whether he’d be able to keep the progress he made on other consoles, or if he’d have to start all over if he ever got the Stadia subscription. So far, Destiny 2 is the only game that supports cross-saves, meaning you can play on a console, then take the game on the go and pick up where you left off. Google has expressed the desire to extend this to other games, but with like other features, it is not coming at launch.

Ian Bogost, video game designer and writer, is skeptical about the Stadia’s potential to attract newcomers into the world of gaming. Sitting at his office in Georgia Tech, surrounded by vinyl figures and stacks of books about all things video games, he admitted to being particularly peeved about the widespread comparison of the Stadia to Netflix. “You already know how to watch television,” he says, “for people who don’t play already, the barrier… is familiarity.”

At launch, this lack of familiarity or interest is what could deter newcomers for trying the Stadia. That may change once the service launches its free offering next year.

Level 3: What it means for the industry

“If you look underneath the hood… Google is just a search advertising company,” says Bogost. “This is a purely commercial move on their part.”

It is true, obviously. The Stadia is Google’s first foray into the lucrative world of video games, and they are late to the party. Sony and Microsoft, more experienced in the gaming industry, have already released similar offerings to the Stadia. Perhaps because of the infrastructure or the timing, this services have not picked up steam.

Wanting a piece of the pie, Apple recently launched the Apple Arcade, a subscription services for iOS that exclusively caters to mobile gamers.

Bogost points at Google’s past fickleness with products that don’t perform in the way they had hoped, and wonders if they’ll stick with Stadia. “I don’t suspect that Google will persist with this in the way [competitors] would, but it’s still early to tell.”

But there is one thing that Google has that their competitors don’t, which perhaps the reason for Google’s push into games: YouTube.

The popularity of video game content on YouTube is staggering. According to The Verge “ Everything from replays of competitive e-sport matches to complete play-throughs of narrative-driven games, game reviews, and curated anthologies of funny moments in games make their way onto YouTube.”

It’s not hard to put two and two together. With YouTube’s monopoly on user-generated video content, and Stadia’s posibility for seamless integration with the video platform, Google is looking to make video game content more available and easier to share. The reveal of Google’s Stadia at this year’s Game Developers Conference showcased the possibility of seeing an ad for a game on a YouTube video, and a button push would allow to purchase that game on Stadia.

Google Stadia is not where it needs to be yet. Not even close, judging by its staggered and fragmented release and the lofty goal that Google has for the service. It’ll come down to whether or not Google sticks with it for as long as it needs to become the “one place for games” that they’ve envisioned.