I like playing games. I like playing them a lot but the reality is that these days I don't do it that much. I'm about as far from a hardcore gamer as it's possible to get, although the games I tend to play overlap significantly with what more "serious" gamers might choose to play (I'm not really at all into the category of games generally described as "casual" these days).

That community is full to the gunwales with people who will complain endlessly about framerates and dropped frames, both in console space and PC space. Seriously. People piss and moan endlessly about this stuff. I find it pretty hard to take because I've been playing games since the 8-bit era and, back then, your typical 3D game had rudimentary wireframe or filled polygon graphics (if you were lucky enough to own a 16-bit machine), polygon counts were incredibly low, and texture fills were practically non-existent. And even with all these simplifications they'd often run at low double-digit frame rates, often dropping down into single digits. Nevertheless for the kind of games they were they remained playable. So I find the contemporary over-obsession with framerate and slowdown a little grating. Even so, I can absolutely see why it's an issue for - particularly - online shooters and racers.

Why do I bring this up?

Google stadia streams games the way Netflix streams films and TV shows. I'm right now looking at a ping trace for a server at a data centre in London, about 60 miles from where I'm sat. Mostly it's in the 16 - 20ms range, but there are quite a few ~30ms packets in there. At 60fps that's typically 1 - 2 frames of latency. This is over a BT fibre broadband connection.

If I switch to tethering to my mobile phone, where I can get a strong 4G connection, my ping time to the same box goes up to, at best ~50ms, and varies wildly peaking all the way out at around 180ms, with the odd outlier packet in the 200 - 250ms range. At 60fps that's typically 3 - 11 frames of latency, and 15 - 16 frames of latency in the worst case.

Now you could argue that for casual, and possibly even some less casual, single player games that doesn't matter. And that's true. But that's not the marketing for Stadia that I was exposed to, where Google were touting a lot of more "serious" or "hardcore" games. For shooters or racing games those latency figures are just way too high, and even on my more stable broadband connection the low ping times aren't stable enough for a great playing experience.

Going back to the Netflix analogy, I generally get decent resolutions, and for at least some of the time (where content supports it) I can view in 4k. But there are drop-offs. I'd expect to see something similar with Google Stadia but, whilst this is tolerable for film and TV most of the time, it's going to make for a pretty annoying gaming experience.

Maybe one day a service like Google Stadia can be a success but it's too early: right now the connectivity isn't nearly good enough for it to sell in the kind of numbers that it would need to in order to be that success. This service is like one of the dinosaurs in The Sound of Thunder: it's already dead but it's too stupid to realise it.