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Google's game streaming service Stadia has been sparking a lot of questions over how it'll fare when your home internet has a strict data cap. The upcoming service will probably consume a lot of data, which could prompt an ISP to pull the plug on your broadband access when you've only gamed on Stadia for several days.
However, Google is playing down the concerns. The company is betting that ISPs will adapt to the demands from cloud gaming. "Data caps is not a universal challenge. The ISPs have a strong history of staying ahead of consumer trends," Google vice president Phil Harrison told IGN and other journalists on Thursday.
Although the state of broadband in the US has often been derided as slow and inadequate, Harrison said ISPs have nevertheless had to raise data caps due to new streaming products hitting the market. "If you look at the trend over time, when music streaming and downloading became very popular, data caps moved up. And then with the evolution of TV and film streaming, data caps moved up. And we expect that that will continue to be the case," he reportedly said.
"The ISPs are smart, they understand that they're in the business of keeping customers happy and keeping customers with them for a long period, Harrison added.
His comments may raise some eyebrows, especially since some US consumers have few choices to what broadband providers they can sign up with. And according to Microsoft, about 163 million Americans have no access to broadband speeds at 25 Mbps.
To run Google's Stadia, you'll need at least a 10 Mbps connection, which can let you play games at a 720p resolution. With a 35 Mbps connection, you can play the games at 4K. Still, the requirements initially caused journalists to speculate that a 4K gaming session with Stadia would hit a 1TB monthly data cap in only 65 hours of constant play. And that assumes the consumer did nothing but game over the home internet connection.
However, Harrison reportedly said that Stadia can actually consume less data. "I should mention that if you take 35 megabits per second, it's not always 35 megabits per second, because we use compression," he added. "There will be some times when actually it's using significantly less data than that. So it's not correct to multiply 35 megabits per second times the number of seconds you can play."
Still, Google plans on adding a feature into Stadia, which will tell you how much broadband data you've been consuming, and offer tips on reducing the data usage.