Can Google Stadia Ever Overcome its Lag Problem?

Google Stadia is now more than six months old, but it has not had any major effect on the video gaming industry. This has been down to a couple of reasons. One of these is that it doesn't particularly solve the problem that Google set out to solve.

Stadia was supposed to be the "Nextflix of video games", except users still have to pay full price for each title they want to play, and they're somewhat limited to the devices they can use it on.

As many suspected before it launched, Stadia also continues to suffer from lag issues. Although Google has been attempting to address these, it has not made the problem go away.

What is Google Stadia

Google Stadia is a video game streaming service. Instead of buying a new games console every 5-10 years, Stadia users just play their favourite games, which are stored on Google servers and streamed to them over the internet.

Players must use a Google Chrome browser, Chromecast Ultra, or one of a small selection of Android smartphones to play Stadia games. In theory, it means they can play big-ticket games on a range of devices, including smartphones, from anywhere.

What is Lag?

In gaming, lag is used to describe when your game falls behind others you're playing with online, or is slow to react to inputs you make. It describes the effects of latency, the time that it takes for a message to be sent and acted upon. It's measured in milliseconds (one-thousandth of a second) and usually described as "ping" in video games and online speed test tools. A ping of less than 100 ms is considered reasonable, although hardcore gamers prefer a ping of less than 50 ms.

Lag is present in all games, whether they're played on computers, consoles, or mobile devices. It doesn't just happen because of internet connections either. There's a delay between you pressing a button on a keyboard or controller, and the action taking place in every game. It's just that the delay is too small to notice since it's typically less than 1 microsecond.

It's only when it comes to sending messages over the internet for online play that lag becomes an issue. Faster wired connections are usually least affected by this, and 5G should also offer low latency.

Even with online play though, lag isn't always an issue. Turn-based and slower-paced games like PokerStars, Words With Friends and Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery aren't reliant on low latency communications, so the gameplay experience isn't affected. It only becomes a problem when playing first-person shooters, racing games, and other such games, where half a second of delay could see you crash or be shot.

Lag on Google Stadia

The problem with Stadia is that it must overcome the increased latency of input instructions, since these are normally handled by the computer, console or smartphone but are now processed on Google's servers.

PC Gamer conducted some tests shortly after its release. When compared to a locally run game, input latency is double on Stadia, which is noticeable enough to be frustrating to many gamers.

Reviews published by critics in May 2020, including one by Android Authority, report the same levels of lag as when the service released in November. They actually found that games started with little to no lag but began slowing down after around 30 minutes of playing.

On many games, Stadia will easily use more than 50 Mbps of bandwidth if it's available. So if you're using a slower connection you'll see the video quality drop off significantly. If you suffer from an unstable connection, you will likely suffer with severe lag and low picture quality. This may be helped by 5G in the future, but most users don't yet have access to it.

Despite attempts from Google to fix the lag issues, it doesn't appear to have made much difference. Reports from some users also seem to show that lag varies from game to game, rather than being uniform across the board.

Google seems committed to Stadia though, so it may fix these issues over time.