Tools to manage Stadia's data usage are in the works, says Google

Google’s inaugural Stadia Direct last month brought as many new questions as it did answers, and those concerns were at the center of an AMA hosted by Stadia Director of Product Andrey Doronichev yesterday.

Given that Stadia’s selling point is its promise to offer high-quality and responsive games streamed from a remote data center to any device running Google Chrome, some questioners voiced concerns over how the tech would work with data caps on some internet and mobile subscriptions.

Based on the information provided by Google, PC Gamer figured that playing a Stadia game at 4K burns through 15.75 GB of data an hour. For 720p streaming, the lowest resolution offered, Stadia uses 4.5 GB per hour.

In the AMA, Doronichev says that Google is aware that this is a concern for some potential Stadia players and, though he believes internet service providers will adapt down the line, Google is working on including tools inside Stadia that give its users some level of control over their data consumption. What those tools are, or when they’ll come to the platform, is still up in the air.

“I can’t predict the future, but I’ve seen that ISPs adapted in the past - I saw it when I was at YouTube - and we’d expect that to continue," said Doronichev. "For players concerned about data usage we’ll definitely have some tools in the Stadia app to manage your data usage to adapt to your unique data situation, but I’m not sure if that will be on day one or a bit later."

“There’s a lot of great ISPs offering plans with 100s of mbps or even gigabits and no caps. We’re seeing different progress in different countries and are certainly expecting ISPs to continually improve the services.”

Doronichev addresses some of the other common queries surrounding Stadia in the full thread, so be sure to check out the rest of that AMA. For instance, developers might be interested in the fact that the Stadia team is “doing everything we can to make [cross-play and cross-progression] happen,” and hope to get the feature working on as many games as possible, provided devs and publishers are on board.