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posted by martyb on Friday November 15 2019, @07:50AM   Printer-friendly
from the broken-promises dept.

As Google barrels forward toward streaming gaming with Monday's planned launch of Stadia, the company is talking about the many promised features that won't be available to Founder and Premier pre-order purchasers on day one.

[...] "On day 1, PC Chrome gameplay won't support 4K, HDR, or 5.1 Surround Sound." Those features will be added in 2020 for PC players.

[...] Family Sharing (which lets you buy a game once and share it with accounts held by family members) "is not supported on day one, so you'll have to buy games for your child's account." The feature is planned for addition "early next year."

[...] Chromecast Ultra units included in the Founders/Premiere bundles are the only ones that will work with Stadia on day one. Other Chromecast Ultra units will be able to play Stadia games after an over-the-air update "soon after launch."

[...] At the highest visual quality, the Stadia app warns that "data usage might reach 20 GB/hr." That's above some previous estimates that expected 15.75 GB/hr for a 4K HDr signal with 5.1 surround sound. Limiting the stream to 720p stereo quality via the app caps data usage at 4.5 GB/hr.

A quick bit of math, 300GB cap / 4.5GB = 66.6 Hours of play time a month. Now, if you're lucky to be on a 1TB cap, you're only limited to 222.22 hours of play time a month, which isn't bad. Except that is at the much lower 720p/stereo audio quality. That's not factoring in other things, like a little bit of youtube, netflix, or other things your family might be doing at the same time.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/google-stadia-will-be-missing-many-features-for-mondays-launch/


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @12:45PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @12:45PM (#920669)

    Play games on non-Windows systems. Anything that can stream video could be able to play.

    Play games on cheap hardware. An $89 PC capable of 720p VP9 hardware decode is good enough. You could use a phone hooked up to a display.

    No Denuvo or other nasty DRM from game companies has to touch your system. You are just getting a video feed from Google.

    The base service is free. You could use it to try game demos without needing to purchase or store the game files.

    If 4K HDR streaming games and other bandwidth wasters become popular, ISPs could raise data caps for all subscribers.