Originally reported by MobileSyrup. Source interview conducted by Kotaku’s Jason Schreier on the Kotaku Splitscreen podcast at E3 2019.
The Core Concern: Input Lag in Cloud Gaming
Input lag — the delay between a player pressing a button and the game registering the action — is one of the most frequently cited objections to cloud-based game streaming. Unlike locally rendered games, streaming platforms must send input data to a remote server, process it, render a frame, and stream the video back to the player. Each step in that pipeline adds latency, and even small delays can noticeably degrade a competitive multiplayer experience.
Google’s Stadia platform, announced and demoed at E3 2019, faced significant scrutiny on this point. At the same event, Kotaku news editor Jason Schreier took the opportunity to ask Bungie’s creative leads directly.
What Bungie Said at E3 2019
On the Kotaku Splitscreen podcast, Schreier interviewed Destiny 2 creative director Luke Smith and executive producer Mark Noseworthy about latency on Stadia. Noseworthy acknowledged that latency is a reality Bungie has always had to engineer around:
“We test Destiny 2 under a lot of latency, cause the internet just sucks. The last mile of internet almost everywhere is pretty garbage, and in some places it’s particularly bad.”
— Mark Noseworthy, Executive Producer, Bungie
Noseworthy said Bungie had worked closely with Google to make its network architecture robust against lag, especially in player-versus-environment (PvE) content, where timing requirements are generally less strict than in competitive play.
The PvP Argument: Shared Cloud as a Latency Equalizer
Schreier pressed further, noting that PvP (player-versus-player) scenarios are where latency is most damaging — a fraction of a second can decide the outcome of a gunfight. Noseworthy’s answer was more optimistic than many observers expected:
“I was talking to some engineers who have done PvP on Stadia. And they said, actually, because if you’re playing on Stadia — with Stadia players — you’re all playing on the same cloud together. And so this last-mile internet shit isn’t a problem on Stadia. The additional latency you’re getting from your controller round-trip or whatever is gonna be offset in a positive way playing PvP on Stadia. Basically, Google’s backbone is better than the internet. Like, it’s better than our traditional internet. And they said that might actually compensate for some of it.”
— Mark Noseworthy, Executive Producer, Bungie
The Technical Reasoning Behind the Claim
Noseworthy’s argument rests on a specific characteristic of how Stadia was architected for multiplayer. In a traditional online game, every player connects to a central game server over the public internet. Each player’s connection quality — their ISP, geographic distance, routing hops — directly affects their experience relative to other players. This is the “last mile” problem: the segment of the network between the user’s home and the broader internet is often congested, inconsistent, or simply slow.
With Stadia, when two players are both running the game through Google’s cloud infrastructure, neither player’s traffic traverses the unpredictable public internet for the player-to-server leg of the journey. Instead, input data travels from the controller to the nearest Google point of presence and then moves entirely within Google’s private backbone network to reach the game server. Because Google operates one of the largest private fiber networks in the world, this internal routing is significantly more predictable and lower-latency than equivalent public internet paths.
The practical implication Noseworthy described: if all players in a PvP match are on Stadia, they all experience a similarly constrained and consistent latency profile, rather than the wildly variable connections typical of console or PC multiplayer lobbies. This consistency, the argument goes, can make the competitive environment more fair even if the absolute latency numbers are not the lowest possible.
Stadia’s Controller Architecture and Lag Reduction
Google designed the Stadia controller to connect directly to Google’s Wi-Fi network and route input to Google’s servers, rather than pairing via Bluetooth to a local device that then forwards input over the internet. This design was intended to shave milliseconds from the input-to-server round trip by eliminating the local device as an intermediary in the chain.
Even with this design, some latency between button press and on-screen response remains unavoidable — the frame must still be encoded, transmitted, and decoded on the display. Noseworthy’s point was that the net competitive impact of that latency is reduced when all opponents are subject to the same conditions.
Important Caveats
- Unverified at time of reporting: As of the E3 2019 interview, Google and Bungie had not conducted public trials of Destiny 2 on Stadia. The claims were based on internal engineering assessments, not publicly reproducible benchmarks.
- Mixed lobbies: The latency-equalization argument applies specifically when all players in a session are on Stadia. In cross-platform or mixed lobbies containing players on console or PC, the dynamics would differ.
- Display and encode latency: Google’s backbone routing addresses network latency, but encode, transmit, and decode latency from video streaming remains a separate constraint not addressed by Noseworthy’s comments.
- Real-world geography: The benefit of Google’s backbone depends on the density of Google’s infrastructure relative to a player’s location. Players in areas underserved by Google PoPs may see less benefit.
Context: Destiny 2 as a Stadia Launch Title
At the time of E3 2019, Destiny 2 was announced as a marquee title for Stadia’s launch, included in the Founder’s Edition bundle planned for release in Canada and other markets in November 2019. As a game with both PvE and competitive PvP modes — including the Crucible — it was a meaningful test case for the platform’s multiplayer capabilities. Bungie’s willingness to engage with latency concerns publicly signaled a degree of confidence in what their engineering collaboration with Google had produced.
Google indicated to MobileSyrup in a separate briefing that public Stadia demo opportunities would be made available ahead of launch, though no specific schedule was confirmed at that time.