Google Stadia Uses a Ridiculous Amount of Data

The promise of Google Stadia’s potential has always seemed a little bit too good to be true, and with the service finally releasing it appears that all of the concerns and reservations have come to fruition. Between a weak launch lineup, games costing roughly the same as other platforms, and underwhelming performance on even top-end internet connections, it’s been a bit of a disaster. Now another issue has been added onto the pile with Stadia using upto a whopping 119MB of data per minute.

It should be clarified that this is 119MB at 1080p, and thankfully a handy breakdown by VentureBeat has given us all the specific details. The test was ran via using a mobile phone as a hotspot for a Chromecast Ultra and a Stadia controller, running the goliath open-world game Red Dead Redemption 2. The results were then tracked by the mobiles own internal data-usage tracker, with it eating up 1.55GB within 13 minutes.

This roughly translates to 7.14GB after an hour of play, and the numbers of even more damning when playing in 4K. Given that 4K uses four times the amount pixels as 1080p, the assumption is that it would eat up roughly four times the amount of data. That’s well over a 20GB within an hour, meaning that Stadia isn’t going to be particularly accessible for anyone with a data cap. It’s still early days for the service, but it seems like the service may be destined to become a short lived disaster.