edit: sorry slowpoke here replying to himself: I get that you are "renting" a gaming hardware for that price, so you don't need to own a gaming computer. So at $120/y it is not bad, if the service is as promised. And then if they shut it down in 3 years then, you spent/lost $360 toward a gaming device. But what happens to the games you purchased? How about renting the games also, like an additional gaming subscription?

It definitely has its pros and cons, and it all comes down to your specific gaming pattern and situation. If you already have a gaming pc or console, this may not be for you.

Sarcasm aside, in the longer term there is probably a business model here where anyone who wants to play a subscription game like World of Warcraft signs up and gets a $100 tablet sent to them for free.

There also might be a model where very high performance rendering combined with ML does stuff where the consumer would otherwise have to pay thousands of dollars for. Not sure that would work in an AR-VR - competitive gaming future.

I saw a demo of Stadia in person a while ago. It was ok, but hardcore, competitive gamers aren’t going to accept the latency gap.

If Stadia got EA Sports to publish NHL, I'm sold. The end to end product experience is just going to be miles better. I imagine certain games unlock Stadia for certain people.

I can imagine Pokemon Go like scenarios of people standing around 5G radios playing Stadia... Except for much less people.

Isn't that a trope of future dystopian Sci-fi? The cold, heartless, amoral mega-corporation, uninterested in any individual's plight, only in efficiency?

We no longer own our entertainment purchases. We no longer hold the data. We no longer own our communications with our friends, relatives, and coworkers. The very fabric of our relationships and our most intimate and valued expressions is now wholly contained on the servers of mega-corporations, to be traded and sold to other corporations, to be mined for information for profit.

Medieval peasants no longer owned the land they worked. There was another level of status in medieval England, the villein: a feudal tenant entirely subject to a lord or manor to whom he paid dues and services in return for land. The villein didn't own his land. He was a chattel accessory to the land.

Where Steam has proven to be very profitable and Valve has a longer track record, and this is their primary business.

Also Stadia has a subscription basis. Cloud gaming is just too important to let Microsoft win. Just like cloud in general.

Regarding the primary business argument. This is exactly what they are hedging against. Google knows ad revenue can‘t grow forever. Regulation might be coming. Cloud and stuff like this will have to take more and more of the load.

What if Stadia under-performs their financial expectations? What if it under-performs those expectations for 2-4 years?

I'm not certain that Google will shut-down Stadia in that time-frame, but I'm absolutely not certain that it will also be running at that point.

I'm extremely confident that Valve won't shut down Steam in that time-frame, though.

Are you taking it as self-evident that Stadia will have more than a couple million users?

> Also Stadia has a subscription basis.

So did fiber.

Fiber is different I think because of shitty regulation that favors incumbents and the insane cost of financing a physical network.

Google can shutdown Stadia because VP changed or Director got promoted to another part of business and nobody is there to sell this product internally - which means it gets shut down.

As soon as Steam decides to shut down (and it will one day, be it tomorrow, or 30 years from now, those games are no longer playable).

Nothing lasts forever.

Also, having worked in game sales, it turns out that buying "drm free unlocks of long tail" games is not expensive. How do you think things like PS Plus Free Games works? Essentially game devs book revenue now for possibl future revenue lost. It's a smart trade for most games unless that game is say skyrim.

Also, PS Plus games are still DRM'ed, and you only have access as long as your subscription is valid.

Almost every game has a pirated version in some torrent site.

To your argument I would say that Stadia is not the "Netflix for games". So I don't see why you expect to pay $10 and play any game you want like Netflix does.

Big if, and if Steam doesn't provide an alternative method or change their DRM before turning off.

Something unprecedented for Steam over 20+ years, but not so for Google.

A more realistic reply might be "will any humans even be alive to inherit my game library?" or "will anyone even be able to run any of my games on the hardware and software available 100 years from now?"

There are, in other words, obvious contingency plans.

With this, the game you "own" lives and runs solely on Google's servers. If they decide to shut those servers down, you're fucked.

But good thing Google isn't known for suddenly EOLing popular products, right?

And so you'll be at the mercy of the lifespan of the hard drive. You won't be able to copy the games to another device as it won't be able to validate ownership.

And so, you'll be at the mercy of the lifespan of yet another Google product.

If I had a physical disc, I could just buy another when it goes bad.

We all know when MS or Sony get punched, they come back and swing harder. When Google gets punched, are they ready to dump another billion in to surviving or will they cancel and run? Google isn't known for long tail losess on new launches.

Until then you will have to buy the game and pay the subscription fee.

I think the concern is fundamentally the same, but the chances feel much higher, which makes it a bigger worry.

Games are just another form of media. YouTube costs Google a ton of money. But the control over media, virality, discovery, and advertisement is worth it to them. So has it been for video. So it shall be for games.

The same can’t be said for this new business model. The entire point of the comment you’re replying to is that Google doesn’t have a good track record of letting products that don’t make them money live.

Through ad revenue?

The entire point of the comment you’re replying to is that Google doesn’t have a good track record of letting products that don’t make them money live.

Not exactly. I thought the point of YouTube was to control media to control ad revenue. If Google is now directly makes ad revenue off of YouTube, that doesn't contradict my position. It means they're more successful and farther along than I was aware of.

What kinda of cost are we talking about when you say "low spec"?

Four years of a subscription you can pay month-to-month (and cancel if you're not using it) is much more doable for many people than a $500+ upfront investment in a gaming rig. Presumably you also built this yourself at that price point, which is another thing other people are not as willing to do.

For me personally, I travel a lot so I like the idea of Stadia because obviously I'm not going to travel around with a gaming rig, and you can pry my 2015 Macbook Pro from my cold, dead hands.