Google Stadia review round-up: Critics say platform ‘feels rushed to market’

Google Stadia review round-up

• Digital Foundry (no score) – “Combined with the feeling that the platform and the ecosystem is still some way off completion and I do feel that it’s perhaps too early for Stadia to be rolling out as a full service, especially when games are limited and the all-important platform exclusives are very thin on the ground.”
• Gaurdian (3/5) – “Ultimately, the only real benefit of the system is the absence of that box under the TV. If your impeccable sense of interior design values that above game selection, price, offline play or community size, go for it.”
• GameSpot review in progress (no score) – “For the moment, cloud gaming still feels like a decent alternative to the real thing, and I don’t think I’m ready to dedicate a full-price game purchase to a secondary platform.”
• IGN review in progress (6/10) – “Google Stadia has fully realized game streaming better with the highest fidelity graphics and lowest input lag of any service I’ve ever used, but there are more features Google has promised that are on their way than are actually available on the service right now.”
• VentureBeat (no score) – “Right now, Google Stadia is a platform for nobody. The company just doesn’t seem to understand any of the audiences it is trying to reach… So Google Stadia might work, but it doesn’t actually matter.”
• Ars Technica (no score) – “Maybe one day these [missing] features and more will put Stadia at or above par with other game platforms. Right now, across all three hardware use cases, the platform itself feels a bit half-baked.”
• CNET (no score) – “Stadia isn’t worth your time yet. Yes, the future is possibly wild, and you can see hints of the streaming-only cloud-based playground Stadia wants to become. But we’ll see what it shapes into over the next handful of months and check back in.”
• Forbes (no socre) – “This has been a catastrophe from start to finish during my testing phase, and the problem is that even if it did work flawlessly, which it absolutely doesn’t, the entire model seemed doomed from the start. This is an enormous miss from Google, and I am really wondering what the fallout is going to be from this ill-conceived early launch.”
• Polygon (no score) – “I recognize I lack the enthusiasm one would associate with a disruptive piece of technology meant to realign the landscape of an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars. But that seismic shift seems distant from this vantage point, just as it did when I tried other streaming services like the defunct OnLive.”
• Wired (no score) – “Google has a lot of features to flesh out and issues to address, but Stadia lives up to at least some of its lofty ambitions. It’s positioned to bring gaming to more people on more platforms than ever before, and there’s something very exciting about that prospect.”
• The Verge (no score) – “There’s no reason anyone should buy into Stadia right now. Google has made sure of that, partly by underdelivering at launch and partly with a pricing scheme that sees you paying three times (for hardware, for the service, for games) just to be an early adopter.”
• PC Gamer review in progress (no score) – “Google’s proven Stadia’s tech really can work—but it’s also proven that without its many missing features, it’s rarely going to be the best way to play any of the games on its service.”
• Telegraph (no score) – “The streaming itself is a genuine technical revelation, to the point where it is often difficult to differentiate between playing on Stadia and native hardware. This is no mean feat, but everything else about Stadia today screams of a product ready for trial dressed up as a commercial release.”
• Metro (no score) – “But the real problem with Stadia isn’t the high prices or the lack of the features but merely the fact that it isn’t what everyone assumed it would be from the start: the Netflix of gaming. To be fair it was never intended to be, but now the idea is in people’s heads Project xCloud already feels like a far more appealing implantation of the same basic concept.”
• Techradar (4/5) – “If you pay for 100Mbps internet speeds, Google Stadia will perform wonderfully and is the game-streaming service we’ve long waited for. That said, if you have a slower connection or you’re tied to a capped data plan, Stadia will still work, but it isn’t quite the ‘negative latency’ experience Google promised and chews through data quickly.”
• Den of Geek (3.5/5) – “Without these features that could make Stadia a truly unique service that can seamlessly connect us all through the games we love, and gives players access to high-end gaming no matter the device, it’s really hard to recommend the platform in 2019.”