I never finished this because Stadia is just such an uninspired platform, and I just couldn't get inspired enough to reiterate exactly how it's shit, to each and every one of you that already knows it's shit.
- The UI is a barely present, ultra-minimal interface you'd expect out of anything big tech in 2020.
- All of the free games I got after three months of Pro were all stuff I had no interest in (save Metro 2033 Redux). Sales prices were bad, even with a Pro account, and every game on sale was, more often than not, more expensive than Steam.
- There's yet to be a single free game for non-Pro users, and the free games for Pro aren't free-to-keep, they're on the same kind of system as Playstation & Xbox One where you claim the games each month, and can play them as long as your subscription's active.
- No cross-activation whatsoever. You can't redeem any of your Steam, uPlay, etc. games on Stadia, or vice versa.
- No mods, either. Aside from having keyboard + mouse support on everything I tried, Stadia has the same restrictions as any console.
- Recorded gameplay videos can only be 30 seconds long, which is absurd considering it's a service by Google. They couldn't even give you 10 minutes and drop the videos in your Google Drive? The codec is Google's own VP9 format, which I've never heard of, but apparently it launched 7 years ago. But at least the videos are 1080p 60fps and look fine.
- There is input lag, of course. When you've got a good connection, it's not horrible, but ever present, so it makes anything timing-intensive a hassle to play, and it's no better than GeForce Now. It gets worse if your connection's being used for anything else at all, so if someone else is watching something or downloading or even if you're running torrents that are just idling, your game's gonna suffer. Weirdly, the video quality doesn't actually drop that much, but the input lag gets way, way worse. You'd think minimizing input lag would be the absolute top priority, but hey, look who's in charge of Stadia.
- It works in Brave, you don't need to install Chrome at all
- It starts up pretty quickly. Click your game, click play, and it's running after a few seconds. It jumps straight into fullscreen and supported my Xbox One controller without any configuration at all, which was really great.
- They gave me a $10 voucher for anything I wanted for keeps. Then again, the sales are so bad that at the time, all I had to choose between without going over $10 was Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition or Doom 64. So I bought Doom 64, which was $5, and they didn't let me keep the rest of the voucher. But at least I have Doom 64, kinda sorta.
