Stadia, the new cloud-gaming platform from Google, can stream Destiny 2 to a TV, PC, or even a smartphone. That’s an impressive technical achievement, but it has a drawback: Stadia sucks down an incredible amount of data.
In our extensive testing, a Google Pixel 3a smartphone playing Destiny 2 over Wi-Fi consumed data at a rate of 10.2 gigabytes every hour. That’s enough to demolish most mobile data plans in 5 hours or less.
Even home Internet might run into issues. Comcast’s Xfinity data plans include 1TB of monthly data in many states. After that, users are charged $10 for each extra 50 gigabytes used, to a maximum of $200 extra per month. That could add up quickly if you do exceed the cap.
You’d have to play Stadia for 3.5 hours every day to blow through a terabyte of data. Most gamers won’t, but serious gamers could easily put in the time. A gamer averaging 5 hours a day would exceed Comcast’s data cap in 21 days. And that’s if the only data you use goes to Stadia, which is not the case for anyone.
Stadia’s data use is high even among streaming services. Netflix officially quotes HD streams at 3GB of data per hour, while UltraHD content can consume up to 7GB per hour. Stadia’s data use isn’t out of line with YouTube, however. Our testing finds that 4K streams of YouTube videos use a similar amount of data on the Pixel 3a.
In today’s world of 100GB game downloads, and 50GB patches, Stadia’s data use may not seem out of line. Gamers are frustratingly familiar with huge downloads that, at times, are mandatory to launch a game.
Stadia promises to fix that annoyance. There’s no initial download; you can simply launch any game you’ve purchased the moment you own it, and you never have to wait for a patch.
But, as our testing shows, that convenience translates to much higher data use over time, and you’ll pay for the convenience if you blow past the data bundled with your Internet plan.
Still not sure if Google Stadia is worth your time and money? Read our in-depth Google Stadia review.
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.