Google Stadia might allow access to high-quality games with no downloads, but that technology comes at a price, as it has been revealed that running games at 1080p can consume over 100MB a minute. There have been concerns that most gamers would struggle to run Google Stadia over the past few months, due to the sheer amount of data that the service uses and how it would cause most people to hit their data cap in a short period of time.
The Google Stadia Founder’s Editions are now in the hands of fans and journalists around the world, and the reaction has been mixed. The reviews of Google Stadia have mostly focused on the limited features of the service at launch and how well it actually performs in the wild, as it had previously only been shown in controlled environments. It’s clear that the technology behind Google Stadia works, but there are some severe limitations that could prevent it from being as widespread as Google might be expecting.
The biggest hurdle facing Google Stadia in the future is the cap on most Internet data plans. It had previously been speculated that Google Stadia could use 1TB in 65 hours and those numbers are now looking realistic, as Venture Beat has worked out the data usage for the service. It seems that running Red Dead Redemption 2 at 1080p on Google Stadia consumes an average of 119MB a minute, for an estimated 7.14GB per hour. These aren’t even the highest settings that Google Stadia can run on, as a game running at 4K resolution would use up even more data.
The data limitations that most customers need to stick to would make Google Stadia a far less attractive service than purchasing the game on an existing system. A lengthy game like Destiny 2 or Red Dead Redemption 2 could eat up an entire month’s worth of data allowance in a short period of time. It’s possible that people who can only play games for a few hours each day would find it less of an issue, but they would also have to consider how much data they need to use their other devices as well.
It’s clear that Google Stadia is still a work in progress. Google Stadia was missing crucial features at launch, most of which won’t be available until next year. The ability to stream high-quality games with no downloads is a tempting prospect, but the limitations imposed by Internet service providers around the world might prevent Google Stadia from being able to function for long periods of time at its highest settings.
Google Stadia is available to consumers now.
