Google Stadia is a wildly ambitious game-streaming service, aiming to give players visual quality that isn’t possible on most traditional consoles and PC systems. However, at launch, some games aren’t hitting the 4K standard that Google set for the service, and the company has issued a response to players concerned over this — without an apology.
In a statement to Eurogamer, Google said that while Google Stadia streams at 4K resolution and 60 frames per second, it’s up to the developers to determine how to get the “best overall quality” in their own games.
“We give developers the freedom of how to achieve the best image quality and framerate on Stadia and we are impressed with what they have been able to achieve from day one,” Google added. “We expect that many developers can, and in most cases will, continue to improve their games on Stadia.”
The signal being sent to your Chromecast Ultra or other 4K-enabled Stadia device can be in 4K resolution if your internet speeds support it, but the games themselves are not always using 4K resolution to begin with. This has been the case with Destiny 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2, which will look crisper on an Xbox One X system regardless of your internet speeds.
It’s an issue that Google could likely fix — with the help of developers — relatively quickly, but it’s far from the only one that Stadia is facing after launch. Only a handful of games are available for the service thus far, and latency and quality issues have been prevalent in several of them. The service’s main social selling points, including the ability to share your game state or jump into a streamer’s game right from YouTube, are also not live yet, nor is the achievement UI. In our review, we found it to suffer from poor performance when played on PC, and didn’t like the subscription’s value, which requires you to still buy most games on top of the monthly fee.
Come next year, there will be a lot more competition in the streaming market. Alongside Project xCloud, which has been running preview tests over the last few months, Amazon is also rumored to launch its own service in 202o, as well.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.