So Google Stadia is actually out. Not "coming soon," not a beta signup page, an actual thing I paid $129 for back in the summer that showed up as a real service today, November 19th. I've been half-dreading, half-looking-forward to this since Google demoed it at GDC back in March, mostly because I have a bad habit of preordering hardware from Google and then feeling weird about it for a year while I wait.
The Founders Edition box has been sitting on my desk since the Chromecast Ultra and controller showed up a couple weeks back, so today was just flipping the switch. Set up the Chromecast fine, downloaded the Stadia app on my phone, and then hit the first real annoyance: the controller won't just talk to your wifi. You have to plug it into a laptop with a USB-C cable first and run it through a setup flow before it'll do wifi direct to the Chromecast. I get why, probably some Bluetooth pairing handshake thing that's easier over a wire, but it's a strange first impression for a product whose entire pitch is "no cables, just stream."
Once it was actually running, the good news is it does work. I loaded up Destiny 2, which is free if you've got Stadia Pro (the $9.99 a month tier you need anyway for 4K), and it looked genuinely sharp on my TV. No install wait, no patch download, just click and play. That part is legitimately impressive and I don't want to undersell it.
The bad news is everything you'd expect from streaming a video game over the actual internet. My apartment wifi is fine for Netflix, fine for video calls, and was not fine for Stadia tonight. Google wants something like 35 megabits down for the full 4K experience and I was hovering closer to 25 most of the evening, so I got soft, blocky frames every time there was fast motion. Dropped a controller input twice mid-firefight in a way that got me killed, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes cloud gaming a hard sell for anything competitive. My building's wiring is probably still from whenever it was last renovated, which was not recently.
There's also just not that much here yet. The launch library is something like twenty-something games, and a chunk of those are ones I already own on other platforms anyway. Red Dead Redemption 2 is there, Mortal Kombat 11, Tomb Raider, a handful of smaller indies. No standout Stadia-only reason to be here, which Google says is coming, but "coming" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
I keep comparing this in my head to Disney+ showing up last week, which had its own opening-day mess with servers falling over for a bunch of people. Different kind of product, obviously, but both are this same moment of a big tech company deciding streaming solves everything and launching anyway before the infrastructure, or in Stadia's case the content library, is really ready. At least Disney+ doesn't need me to have gigabit fiber for the picture to look decent.
I don't regret the $129, mostly because the Buddy Pass got a friend three months free and he's a lot more forgiving about compression artifacts than I am, so he's having a better night with it than I am. But if you're on the fence and don't already have a Founders Edition sitting around, I'd wait. Wait for the free tier Google keeps promising for next year, wait for your ISP to catch up, wait for the library to stop being mostly ports of stuff that already runs fine on a five-year-old console you own. I wanted to like this more than I actually do tonight, if I'm honest about it.