Stadia Was A Failed Experiment, But Being Able To Jump Into People's Screenshots Felt Like The Future

thegamer.com:

Google announced the death of game streaming service Stadia today, and I will not miss it. Despite having a decent internet connection, at least by the standards of the bandwidth-starved United Kingdom, I simply couldn't play games on it in 4K. Not only was controller lag a constant frustration in anything but the slowest-paced games, but the image would jitter and freeze as I played too. It was better in 1080p, but then it felt weirdly like playing a YouTube video, with a blurry, compressed image that looked like ass on my UHD monitor. I really tried to like it, and gave it more than a fair shake, but it just wasn't an enjoyable experience.

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However, there was one thing about Stadia I did like—and the only time the service felt anything like 'the future' to me. In stylish roguelike PixelJunk Raiders, a platform exclusive developed by Q-Games, you can make use of a feature called State Share. Today, recording video clips and taking screenshots is a standard feature on games consoles—but Stadia takes this a step further. A URL is generated alongside captured images and clips, which anyone who owns the game can then click on to instantly play the level featured. Cool idea, right? Not just passively looking at someone's screenshot, but actually diving inside it.

The levels in PixelJunk Raiders are procedurally generated, so if the algorithm spits out something particularly cool you can take a screenshot, share it online, and let other people experience it. A nice little community sprung up around this feature, with like-minded players teaming up and creating big, sprawling spreadsheets with links to fun, difficult, or otherwise interesting levels they found. I found