There's no way to voice chat on Google Stadia — a stock-standard part of the PC, Xbox, and PlayStation online gaming ecosystems, and something that even Nintendo has started to come around to with its Switch console.
"What's going on there?" one Reddit user wrote in the Stadia subreddit. "How can it be that there is still no chat in Stadia?" Moreover, there's no word on when a voice chat function is coming.
Both Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3, which launched over 10 years ago, had voice chat functionality built in from the start.
There is no operating system or dashboard on the service, and there's no way to use the Google Stadia controller wirelessly on a computer or with a smartphone — it has to be connected with a wire. If you have an iPhone, Stadia doesn't work there yet, and the same thing goes for most Android phones; the only smartphone supported are Google's Pixel line. Even if you pay for the Pro version of Stadia, which is supposed to stream games in the highest 4K resolution, games played through Chrome don't stream in 4K.
That's before we start talking about promised features of Stadia that differentiate it from the competition, much of which isn't implemented.
Google said you could watch a YouTube video of a game and, simply by clicking a button in the video, jump right into that game on Stadia. That has yet to materialize, nor is it clear when that's coming.
Thus far, Stadia is digital storefront that sells you games. Many of the platform features that people expect with a game platform are still missing, with no official word on when they'll actually drop.