If you have the actual .swf file, you can run the game in Flash Projector, easy!
> Games for ancient Windows versions can be devilishly hard to get running
What doesn't work in Virtualbox? Luckily, games from the 90's generally don't need GPU acceleration. I'm also continuously amazed by how much just works in modern Windows.
> games for PowerPC Macs are all but impossible.
There you have a point. Although even then, you can use VMWare + some unlocker tools to install Snow Leopard, and from there use Rosetta. Qemu is also supposed to be pretty good these days, although I've never tried it. Alternately, it's not that difficult to track down old Mac hardware.
> Emulation is flaky and incomplete for console games of all kinds.
Huh?
The Atari, NES, SNES, Genesis, Playstation, and all Gameboy models have damn-near perfect emulators. Identical to console down to the pixel, for every game.
Dolphin isn't quite take-a-microscope-to-the-screen accurate, but it will run the vast majority of the Gamecube and Wii's library such that you won't notice a difference.
The N64 and PS2 lack great emulators, but what's available is still very good. Some niche titles will exhibit glitches or refuse to run, but most stuff works well enough.
The Wii U and PS360 don't have such good emulators yet, but that's because those consoles are relatively recent. RPCS3 and Cemu are making great progress, and can already run a handful of large titles without problems, such as Persona 5 and BotW.
The original Xbox lacks a usable emulator, which sucks. Luckily, this isn't the norm.
Emulator developers have done amazing work, and the result is that most of gaming history is fully open to your exploration. Games will never be quite as plug and play as music files, but they aren't that labor-intensive to get working either.
What if it depends on the page it was originally hosted on? https://help.adobe.com/en_US/as3/dev/WS5b3ccc516d4fbf351e63e...
This is exactly the problem with making games rely on external servers in order to start, as Stadia does (for entirely different reasons).
I obviously can't say about every game out there, but in my limited experience it's really quite decent.
This is an excellent effort to preserve old browser plugin games.
PowerPC and 86k macs can be run under emulation so not everything is lost. Similar for games for DOS and ancient Windows versions, though from my personal experience 99.9% of old games will work on Windows 10 with some tweaks and/or wrappers (like dgVoodoo2, dxwnd, otvdm, etc and of course user made patches). It is extremely rare that i find an old game i cannot get to run.
Rather, my concern is that lots of people already view games as having a "lifespan", and if they trust a streaming service to endure for a decade that might be accepted as "how long games last anyway".
Which means your (full price) "rental(s)" and the subscription fees for Stadia are gone right out the window.
Then when you want to play one of those games again you'll have to subscribe to the next GaaS and most likely buy... sorry rent that game again probably for full retail price. Rinse and repeat.
GaaS to me is an utterly nonsensical cash grab and as others ITT have mentioned a solution looking for a problem.
Considering that I still play games that I bought over 20 years ago, it would take at least 20 years for a streaming service to be able to convince me of this.
In particular, online FPS games have high requirements and many already have "fixed" lifespans because matchmaking relies on the publisher's servers. Given how many excellent games have switched to community hosting after they were abandoned by the publisher, that'd be a real shame.
To be honest, I feel like this has already happened to computer games in general. Online and/or phone-home requirements pushed me out of large segments of the games market years ago.
Every Flash/Shockwave browser game is becoming increasingly hard to play. Games for ancient Windows versions can be devilishly hard to get running, and games for PowerPC Macs are all but impossible. Emulation is flaky and incomplete for console games of all kinds. When it comes to something like a music library, "buy don't rent" makes a lot of sense to me, but the lifespan of software and particularly games tends to be finite even when you do own them.
Now, I totally grant that Stadia will probably have 10% the lifespan of Flash or PowerPC architecture. But lots of people avoided a string of ephemeral music-streaming services and finally bought in with Spotify or Google Play Music. Lots of people avoided ebooks, but are finally starting to come around. So even if Stadia looks too short-lived, the second or third big game-streaming service might convince people it'll last as long as any other software does. (Along with picking up all the users who are only interested in one or two AAA titles to begin with.)
I share the rest of your concerns though, so that sort of worries me more. Streaming games may be what finally enables the death of free/independent modding, DRM-cracking, tracker disabling, and offline play after years of battles with publishers trying to push them directly.