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Google Stadia will be Missing Many Features for Monday's Launch

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

Freeman writes:

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: 3, Insightful) by EEMac on Friday November 15 2019, @01:42PM (1 child)

    by EEMac (6423) on Friday November 15 2019, @01:42PM (#920684)

    I like the added point about data caps. Innovation in America is being held back, badly, in a thousand ways, by our ISPs.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Friday November 15 2019, @03:37PM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Friday November 15 2019, @03:37PM (#920701) Journal

    Starlink [wikipedia.org] could make all the difference, especially for rural internet users. We may be able to get gigabit connections nearly everywhere on the planet. If cheaper tiers are offered, 100 Mbps would also be just fine, and even 10 Mbps (no data cap = 3 terabytes a month theoretically, and 10 Mbps = 4.5 GB/hour mentioned in the summary for 720p) would be an improvement for many [cnet.com].

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