First E3 conference: Google Stadia reaction.

I do not often talk about video games here but it’s a passion I’ve had since childhood. It’s been a few years now that we meet with friends at Mary and Daniel’s, my boyfriend’s best friends. Big house, fiber, huge TV and Thai food has all the meals, in short the paradise for the geek that we are all, fine to follow together the conferences of the E3 (a big event of video games, where are presented all the future developments).

Today, Google’s Stadia conference took place, but what is Stadia?

Stadia is google’s cloud gaming service, which allows you to play games that require a lot of resources on very weak devices. (Microsoft will also offer an equivalent service, Xcloud.)

But by what witchcraft?
The game is run on a server, equivalent to a mad PC, remote that just sends the video stream to the players. Very handy when like me we have a basic PC for classes and not necessarily want to buy a pc or console to play the last big games out. (ok I have access to a big pc via my boyfriend or my father)
It’s all well and good, but there are still questions:

• What about latency? (the response time between the moment when you press a key and the moment when the action is done on the screen.) Normally, you press a button, the information goes to the machine that sends the video stream to the screen. Here the information sent by the button does not go to a machine that is a few meters but several kilometers.
• What connection speed to enjoy? And yes you need a bastard connection (35Mb/s) to enjoy in 4k, but a connection 10Mb/s would play in 720p, and 20Mb/s for 1080p (full hd).
• What price for games? We know nothing about it at the moment, for a service that feels like going out in November, it’s worrying.

But they have 2 types of subscription:

• A “free” Stadia base where games are paid per unit, limited to 1080p with stereo sound
• A “paid”, Stadia Pro at 12 euro per month with a number of free games per month, the first being Destiny 2 with all its extensions, and discounts on the purchase of other games.

Google offers a pre-order offer, for 129 euro they offer a chrome cast and a joypad, as well as 3 months of Stadia Pro and an early access to the service.

In either case if we stop his subscription, we keep access to our games. As long as talking about games they presented a hoist, including Baldur’s gate 3, I screamed, and it’s already my game of E3! Haha! I’m thrilled, even if in fact we have not seen much.

Speaking of games, the big problem is that at no time have we seen exclusivities, only multi support games that will surely be present at their main competitor, Microsoft and their Xcloud. With its Xbox branch, Microsoft will have all the multi support games while having its exclusivities like Halo, Forza and the games in preparation in the studios they bought recently.

Let’s wait for the Microsoft conference this weekend to see which offer will be the most interesting, and wait to see the first tests in real condition to see how cloud gaming works in everyday life to see if it’s really worth the cost.