Youtube Premium recently had a promotion for their members to get free Google Stadia, with one of their upgraded Chromecast Ultras and a Stadia controller.

I hadn’t really looked into the Stadia, not really knowing what it was, but free is free, so I decided to try it.

Apparently, Google Stadia is based around streaming a game from the internet using their controller to control it, and casting it to a screen via Chromecast or other device that can handle streamed games.

Here are my thoughts on it:

The controller feels really comfortable in my hands, and appears to be well made.

I appreciate the upgraded Chromecast. I’m not noticing a difference for streaming things other than a game that needs low latency, but I assume it’s beefed up to handle the higher throughput needed for gaming.

You better have a high speed internet connection and/or not be competing with anything that uses a lot of data on your home network. I was downloading and installing something on my computer in the other room, and the network couldn’t handle doing that while trying to play a game in the other room. I do like that the software made it clear when there wasn’t enough bandwidth to play games at the same time. Icons on the screen changed colors to indicate that there was a problem. If you don’t have plenty of network bandwidth available at the time that you are trying to play, don’t bother.

You may want to make sure that your idle screen on your Chromecast always shows the log in code for your stadia. It took me a bit to realize why Stadia wasn’t loading when I turned on the controller. The controller wasn’t linked to the TV automatically!

I’ve realized that I am not the intended audience for this device. I invest in my own gaming rig, and I don’t see this supplanting that investment. For someone who hasn’t done so, particularly someone who has a good internet connection but not a lot of high-end hardware, this could be a convenient way to get into gaming without spending a huge amount of money. The hardware running the games is on the internet, and it’s the job of Google to keep their hardware up-to-date on the other end. All you have to get is the controller, a device to connect to (likely a Chromecast), a screen, and pay for the service. Supposedly you can play high-requirement games (they have Cyberpunk 2077, for example), but I haven’t tested that out as I’m not investing more money into games on an alternate system.

That was just my quick thoughts on the subject, I’ve been rather preoccupied with other things at the moment, (*cough* 2077 *cough*) and like I said, I’m not the target demographic for this system.