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Google Stadia - Launch day line-up (12 games) and planned releases by the end of the year (14 games)
Here's the official blog post: https://www.blog.google/products/stadia/lineup-games-coming-to-stadia/
But since they decided to list the games in the incredibly convenient format of... three slideshows, I'll re-type the important info here and save you that trouble.
Launch titles:
- Assassin's Creed Odyssey
- Destiny 2: The Collection
- GYLT
- Just Dance 2020
- Kine
- Mortal Kombat 11
- Red Dead Redemption 2
- Rise of the Tomb Raider
- Samurai Shodown
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition
- Thumper
- Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition
Planned releases in the rest of 2019:
- Attack on Titan 2: Final Battle
- Borderlands 3
- Darksiders Genesis
- Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2
- Farming Simulator 19
- Final Fantasy XV
- Football Manager 2020
- Ghost Recon Breakpoint
- Grid
- Metro Exodus
- NBA 2K20
- Rage 2
- Trials Rising
- Wolfenstein: Youngblood
The fact that they are opening with a fighting game, where latency can completely break the entire experience, goes far to say how much confidence they have in their "negative latency" concept. That being said, I won't put much stock in it until the program goes public.
Yeah, two fighting games (Mortal Kombat 11 and Samurai Shodown), and also Thumper, which is a rhythm-like game that requires high timing precision to be able to do well. There's a "perfect turn" mechanic in it with a fairly small timing window, and you need to be able to hit it consistently to get high scores/ranks. If the Stadia latency isn't consistently low, it's going to make the game extremely frustrating.
It definitely seems risky to me to launch with a full 1/4 of your lineup being highly timing-sensitive games that seem likely to emphasize the main weakness of a streaming service, but like you said, if they've managed to make them work well it'll be a good demonstration.
I participated in the "Project Stream" beta which was only for Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, and I didn't run any benchmarks, but there was no noticeable latency for me. The game felt highly responsive and totally playable. Occasionally there was a slight dip in picture quality, but never any input lag I could discern. I think that issue may have been congestion on my own network anyway, not something upstream.
Fighting and rhythm games are a whole 'nother level, but after my initial experience, I'm optimistic they can pull it off.
It seems like a lot could be done to compensate for lag in rhythm games, since the music and moves are all predetermined. There could be a fair bit of latency and it doesn't matter as long as the video doesn't stall and the game compensates for it by rewarding the player based on when the video and sound actually played.
I guess that this impressive for a two month run, and maybe they can corner some mobile advertising magic in the play store or some "Play it now in your web browser" webverts, but outside of the Google Connection, I don't see what this adds over Epic's Exclusives or Steam's Domination of the platform and eventual Cloud Gaming solution whenever that sees the light of day. Maybe I'm over looking the value of "Try It Now!"
I don’t know much of stadia and immediately dismissed it as another short lived hype, but I am amazed by this lineup. I thought it would just be some random low budget games like Apple Arcade.
I think you might be unfairly dismissing Apple Arcade too, there are a lot of excellent games on there as well. They're definitely more on the "indie" side than "AAA blockbusters", but there are a lot of high-quality, interesting games available on there, and I'm really hoping that a lot of them will end up coming to PC eventually because I want to play them.
As someone who may not have a PC that can run games properly for the next one or two years (will be abroad for grad school so the desktop will stay here if I can't find a buyer) I genuinely hope that Stadia will be a feasible option.