Hands on with Google Stadia: It works, but is that enough?

SAN FRANCISCO—Shortly after Google announced its upcoming Stadia streaming platform this morning at the Game Developers Conference, the company opened up a few kiosks showing off the technology in a corner of a Moscone Center West hallway. Unfortunately, these extremely limited demos didn't answer most of the burning questions that Google has still left unanswered about it much-hyped platform.
The most popular demo, judging by the crowds gathered around the screen, was an opportunity to play Assassin's Creed Odyssey on a standard Chromebook via Stadia streaming. The game—running at apparently native resolution and 60 frames per second on a 1080p display—was for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from a local copy running on a high-end gaming rig. Playing and watching the games for a few minutes, I didn't notice any of the input delay, dropped frames, or stuttering that sometimes characterizes the current state of game streaming.





By far the most important part of this image is the Chromebook in the foreground powering the display.



The important caveat here, of course, is that the demo was running on a wired Ethernet connection hooked to the Moscone Center's industrial-strength Internet hookup. The demo team couldn't confirm the location for the Google data center where the game was actually running, but we can't imagine it would be very far from the heart of San Francisco, where the demo was being played.
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