Google Stadia UI reportedly lags and glitches once users hit the 1,000 friend limit

Oh boy, this one hurts to write, but it’s my duty to report the facts, so here we go. Recently discovered by The Nerf Report, Google Stadia seems to have some major issues operating smoothly once a user reaches the 1,000 friend limit. Sure, it’s an odd problem to have for sure, but for a cloud gaming service that prides itself on not slowing down the gamers with downloads or updates, loading issues kind of negate some of that shine.

Bryant Chappel of The Nerf Report recently hit 1,000 friends on Stadia, and upon launching the web app, the library and play button for the top game take about 18.2 entire seconds to load compared to the 2.2 seconds he has to wait on his alternate account with far fewer people added.

However, a slow start button is not the only UI issue that rears its ugly head with a full friend’s list. Pretty much all of the interface elements including the controller pairing menu glitch out and lag, and sometimes, Stadia itself completely freezes, resulting in the need to refresh the website. These issues occur after the play button appears, meaning the entire frontend experience of Stadia is choked up under these circumstances.

You can have up to 1,000 friends on Stadia and trying to add the 1,001st friend will not be possible as the “Add friend” button is greyed out and you’re met with a message that states “Your friends list is full! If you want to add this friend, you’ll need to remove someone else.”

It’s really interesting that the company would both allow users to add this many people to their list while simultaneously not testing for these sorts of bugs and this much slowdown before setting the feature into motion. Notice how I didn’t say that it’s surprising because, well, I’m never surprised to see Google release a feature half-baked and untested.

Still, Stadia has been a shining beacon of customer support and setting standards for expectations that I’ve repeatedly said the rest of Google could learn from. Luckily, gameplay doesn’t seem to be affected by anything mentioned here today, but my hope is that these problems are quickly resolved, even if that means Stadia has to lower the friend cap for each user. Let me know in the comments if you’ve ever experienced any lag or glitching on Stadia or if this is news to you.