Google Responds to Upset Stadia Customers Over Visual Quality, Doesn't Apologize

Players upset about Stadia’s 4K issues get response, but no apology, from Google

By Gabe Gurwin November 25, 2019

Google Stadia is a wildly ambitious game-streaming service, aiming to give players visual quality that isn’t possible on most traditional consoles and PC systems. However, at launch, some games aren’t hitting the 4K standard that Google set for the service, and the company has issued a response to players concerned over this — without an apology.

In a statement to Eurogamer, Google said that while Google Stadia streams at 4K resolution and 60 frames per second, it’s up to the developers to determine how to get the “best overall quality” in their own games.

“We give developers the freedom of how to achieve the best image quality and framerate on Stadia and we are impressed with what they have been able to achieve from day one,” Google added. “We expect that many developers can, and in most cases will, continue to improve their games on Stadia.”

The signal being sent to your Chromecast Ultra or other 4K-enabled Stadia device can be in 4K resolution if your internet speeds support it, but the games themselves are not always using 4K resolution to begin with. This has been the case with Destiny 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2, which will look crisper on an Xbox One X system regardless of your internet speeds.

It’s an issue that Google could likely fix — with the help of developers — relatively quickly, but it’s far from the only one that Stadia is facing after launch. Only a handful of games are available for the service thus far, and latency and quality issues have been prevalent in several of them. The service’s main social selling points, including the ability to share your game state or jump into a streamer’s game right from YouTube, are also not live yet, nor is the achievement UI. In our review, we found it to suffer from poor performance when played on PC, and didn’t like the subscription’s value, which requires you to still buy most games on top of the monthly fee.

Come next year, there will be a lot more competition in the streaming market. Alongside Project xCloud, which has been running preview tests over the last few months, Amazon is also rumored to launch its own service in 202o, as well.

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