Having its humble beginnings concealed under the guise of Project Stream, Google has been working on its game streaming service for quite some time, leading up to the official announcement of Stadia earlier this year. Despite initial praise, mounting setbacks, and even fears that the service may cave before reaching success, Stadia is finally ready for prime time. Starting today, gamers can purchase and play any of the 22 launch titles on Google's new cloud gaming service.

To play games on Stadia, you need to have previously purchased a Stadia Founder's Edition, or you can currently purchase the Stadia Premiere Edition for $129 on the Google Store. The free Base version of Stadia that would allow gamers to purchase and stream content at 1080p without a recurring subscription isn't expected to launch until sometime in 2020.

We were lucky enough to get our paws on Stadia just a little bit early. In our official review, we were impressed by its performance and platform potential, though we were miffed by the paltry launch game lineup, missing features, and Google's inescapable penchant for killing off projects before they've fully matured. Still, if you're thinking about picking up a Stadia Premiere package, you might want to wait for this Black Friday deal on a Stadia Premiere + Nest Wi-Fi bundle. Stadia is currently available to gamers in 14 different territories, including the US, UK, and Canada.

Some Founders codes have not been sent out in the correct order

Google's Stadia rollout has been anything but smooth sailing, and now it's come to light that access codes haven't been sent out to some players in time for the arrival of their Founder's Edition hardware. Early adopters were promised they'd receive their codes on a first come first served basis so they could shotgun a Stadia username, but Google has had to admit that it messed up — a company representative took to Reddit to respond to disgruntled customers...

We're sorry for the delayed responses. We've identified an issue where a small fraction of Stadia access codes were sent out of order. That has been addressed. We've continued to roll out codes in the sequence in which we received your pre-order. We look forward to seeing you on Stadia.

With plenty of bad publicity so far, Google will hope that its servers can handle the load as more users gain access to the service. My Founder's Edition kit is apparently due to arrive today, although I didn't order it until September 18, so I hope for the sake of those who ordered before me and haven't yet got theirs that it's incorrect.