It’s hard to describe precisely what my issue with the controller is aside from simply saying it’s just weird and explaining as best I can why it feels so very weird and awkward. Stepping down from a hardwired connection to a dual-band 5GHz connection, Stadia still held up immensely well with only small issues in the audio impairing an otherwise flawless performance. Google’s push for stadia is that you don’t need a gaming console or a powerful PC to play the biggest and best games. It can be plugged in directly to a PC, Mac, Chromebook, or Android device to play in a wired enviornment, but lacking bluetooth means that it is not the best choice for those who want to game in different physical locations.

Thankfully, we've seen devs want to help Google Stadia players to avoid them losing their saves and progress.Once in a while, he even digs out his trusty ol’ Gameboy Advanced SP to play the best game ever made: Pokemon Leaf Green. When he’s not spending time writing or ogling new tech, he’s probably playing NBA 2K or watching a true crime documentary. However, the bundle doesn't include a Stadia subscription, so you'll have to pay for that out of pocket. I would recommend users who want to play Stadia in multiple locations to use a Bluetooth controller instead.

That said, if you had a slower connection or you’re tied to a capped data plan, Stadia will still work, but it wasn’t quite the ‘negative latency’ experience Google promised and chews through data quickly. I have unlimited data on my home internet connection, so that doesn’t matter to me, but if I had a cap on my monthly internet data, that would be a huge chunk of that. We also recently learned Google Stadia will have game trials after launch, while the service will offer ‘roughly’ one free game per month. The wireless interface is actually WiFi and some form of Bluetooth and not easily jailbroken last time I checked. So, how did it stack up to competitors like PlayStation Plus Premium (which merged PlayStation Now into the service) and GeForce Now?For as much as Google positions Stadia as a competitor to Sony and Microsoft, in a way it really is trying to go in a unique direction. Whether you play games on PC or console, we've all been subjected to massive downloads that take minutes (or hours) to complete. I gave up though, after a few minutes, solely due to the eye strain the UI caused me, even though I have perfectly fine vision.

Well, we found that Stadia significantly outperformed PS Plus in terms of stability and while GeForce Now promises a larger library, Stadia is streaming 4K HDR and continues to release bigger titles. jack for a pair of headphones while on the back you’ll find a USB-C port for pairing and power, plus a pair of triggers and bumpers. For our PC test we played the first few hours of the Stadia-exclusive GYLT in a regular Chrome browser, and we didn’t notice a single dropped frame or artifacting of any sort throughout the entire, hour-long session. For our last test, we tried Stadia on a new Wi-Fi network that, according to an Ookla speed test, maxed out around 15Mbps. It’s exactly what we’ve seen happen on services like PlayStation Now, so it’s not entirely unexpected here.

Ambitious as it sounds, we tested it in our own home and can firmly say that it’s a true console alternative which did a lot of things right. This includes big hitters like Red Dead Redemption 2, Hitman 3, and Destiny 2, while Ubisoft confirmed on Twitter that it has plans to issue players free PC copies of the Stadia games they own. Higher latency means that the delay between when you push a button on the controller to when the game registers that action is visible and noticeable, which is bad for fast paced action games, or multiplayer games. We also have the always fabulous, annual Google event coming up on September 30th (which we will have full coverage of).

If there is a game I want to play and I get it on a good sale on Stadia, I’d have no hesitation picking it up and playing it on that platform.

Latency, which is how long it takes for data to get from the Stadia servers to your device, matters a lot.