It's actually neither bandwidth nor latency (alone). Its variability - the reason you can play a 4k video on YouTube smoothly is because of buffering, which smooths out dips in mbps. Stadia can't buffer for obvious reasons, meaning every frame has to be delivered with minimal latency.

I don't know what Stadia does, but it could

* downsample when connection is poor * extrapolate future frames from past frames, either locally or by sending bonus frames from server.

What about latency to inputting some command on your controller? Like "move to here".

I guess I should have clarified. My only devices are a Pixelbook and my work MBP - no desktop. Playing at home (or work) are totally fine for me. Playing games like Hearthstone (where latency isn't breaking factor) is fine with me as well.

Why not play Hearthstone or similar games on MBP? They need to invent new class of games: latency-tolerant, but graphically intensive. Photorealistic turn-based massively multiplayer games?

Most JRPGs would fit the bill, especially the turn-based combat ones.

Huh? Most modern JRPGs are action based nowadays. The days of turn based are mostly over.

A lot of older games are being re-released so they shouldn't be ignored, and even action based ones often have internal cooldowns and timers for a pseudo turn-based system.

I mean Persona 5 was a pretty big game that AFAIK has turn based combat. It would be nice to stream since I won't own a Playstation any time soon.

Regardless, they are definitely less latency intensive than FPS or other genres.

Heroes of Might and Magic as an MMO!

FWIW Hearthstone calibre games are already playable on any moderately recent smartphone. Not much gain from Stadia in that regard.

To add to that: I've played Hearthstone itself on a Oneplus One (phone from 2014).

The word "calibre" is doing a lot of work in your sentence.

There are all sorts of seemingly low-resource-intensive, low-latency, even old games of that "calibre" that stutter on my Macbook Pro.

That's more of an indictment of how bad Apple computers are at handling games.

Apple computers with discrete GPUs (like the aforementioned MacBook Pro) are great at running DirectX-based games natively under Windows via Boot Camp.

They're also great at running Metal-based (e.g. Apple Arcade) games natively under macOS.