True to an extent, but people with gaming as a hobby have been using Nvidia or Radeon products for a long time, and there's a certain level of trust regarding Nvidia and gaming.
GeForce as a gaming card brand has now existed for longer than a third of all gamers have been alive for now (and that's for those who don't remember Riva TNT).
Back when computers didn't come with graphics accelerators, you surely knew who made your graphics chip if you wanted to play games.
So a company like Nvidia would exist from interacting directly with the gamers (who would build their PCs and buy graphics cards).
No, the beta was last year with assassins creed and that was free and they gave everyone a free copy of the game afterwords.
If that were Stadia, I’d be more bullish.
"Stadia is the first offering that matches my needs of a Netflix for games"
These services have existed for a while. OnLive failed because it was ahead of it's time, and lagged.
GeForce Now is free, while it's still in beta. Project xCloud is free, while it's still in beta. Google Stadia is £120 down and a monthly fee... while it's clearly still in beta.
"If Google doesn't drop the ball"
Google already dropped the ball here by asking for money for a beta test, and being the only big player to do so.
I like Google, but this was just the wrong way to go about bringing this product to market.
Microsoft have experience working with players and game developers. Nvidia have experience working with game developers - less so with players, but the Shield has done well.
The optics here are just bad. To see both of those companies put their services through prolonged public testing periods without charge makes Stadia look either naive (in that they thought this would be easy to build) or cynical ("hey the customers have to bear the sunk costs if it fails").
I don't for a second think Google is being cynical - but Stadia should have had a free public beta before taking a cent from paying customers.