Two days into launch and everyone's worst fears are proving to be pretty true: Stadia has more or less failed to deliver on just about anything. The concept looked too good to be true from the beginning: the ability to stream games onto anything that can run a Chrome browser, your Chromecast, your phone, and quite probably some IoT refrigerators.
It's all fun and games until a Google image search provides results
The hard skepticism was drawn when Google promised "negative latency" to sooth concerns about input lag that are present on any game streaming service. Basically even if a remote machine is doing all the heavy compute lifting for you, due to the nature of the internet it will take some time for a button to travel to the host machine, register, then deliver the feedback to your client running on the center console of your Ford Focus. But before that can even be addressed, Google has had some problems delivering things before you can even fire it up.
One of the carrots that Google held to entice preorders was the ability to get on the ground floor of reserving your unique username. Granted, it would be nice to not have to resort to naming myself "Möbius2xXx69" like usual, however we can all pretty much agree that Steam has figured this one out by allowing you to change your username every time you think of a new dick joke. However, those emails for name reservations had a lot of problems getting to their recipients of the $130 version of Stadia. That version also comes with a Chromecast Ultra, the only version of Chromecast that's Ultra enough to support Stadia in the interim. Google claimed that this is because of their focus on 4K, however the 4K of Stadia is actually upscaled 1080p. That is then compressed and streamed to your device. And this isn't even considering the fact that at launch the Stadia app that was required to input the activation code to begin playing was only compatible with Google Pixel phones, and not other phones running Google's own Android OS.
Needless to say, by the time players were able to get through these problems, the "negative latency" proved to not be as magical as it sounded, as Stadia had a lot of the same input lag issues as other game streaming services. But still, some customers have been reporting that they've received everything and it's all working as intended and delivering a great experience. For them, I'm glad things are working and I really hope they have a good time. However, I'm taking this as another lesson about preordering and things that sound too good to be true.
