When Google announced the Stadia, they made a whole bunch of very lofty promises, that, had they been followed through on, would have made their platform a truly exciting entry into the market. Unfortunately, as we now know, they bungled on the execution in almost every respect.
One of those respects is the visual quality and fidelity of the video games on Stadia. Google had promised cutting edge visuals—4K and 60 frames per second, promising graphics near next gen quality, but now—which Stadia does not deliver on, with many games running sub-4K, or sub-60 FPS, or both.
When asked to explain this discrepancy versus what was explicitly promised, Google actually shifted the blame to the developers of the games, stating that Stadia itself is rendering all streams at 4K and 60fps, but what individual games are rendered at will come down to the developer of said game.
“Stadia streams at 4K and 60 FPS – and that includes all aspects of our graphics pipeline from game to screen: GPU, encoder and Chromecast Ultra all outputting at 4k to 4k TVs, with the appropriate internet connection,” Google told 9to5Google.
“Developers making Stadia games work hard to deliver the best streaming experience for every game. Like you see on all platforms, this includes a variety of techniques to achieve the best overall quality. We give developers the freedom of how to achieve the best image quality and frame rate on Stadia and we are impressed with what they have been able to achieve for day one.
“We expect that many developers can, and in most cases will, continue to improve their games on Stadia. And because Stadia lives in our data centers, developers are able to innovate quickly while delivering even better experiences directly to you without the need for game patches or downloads.”
Which obviously isn’t a good answer, because not only are you doing nothing to allay the fears or concerns of your jilted early adopters, you’re also potentially throwing the development community under the bus, which are the two parties you don’t want to piss off when you are a new entrant in the fickle gaming market, with a struggling platform.
