The problem with Stadia is that it costs money, the service costs a monthly fee, and on top of it you have to buy the games. What happens to those games if you stop paying the fee? If you stop using Stadia? If Google deprecates Stadia like many are worried. I'll tell you: you lose the game.
If I, conversely, buy the same $60 game on Steam, I know it'll be there years down the road, that I'll be able to play it on any PC I build, and I don't have to maintain a monthly fee for it.
What Google is trying has been tried many times before, by people who had more permissive game ownership structures.
Do not tell us we shouldn't be worried about using such a product from Google given their track record -- especially when the costs to them are enormous in terms of computing power and the reception has been very tepid (meaning those costs are larger per-user than they likely anticipated).
WHAT? I've been under a rock and I assumed that it was a service where you buy a controller, already own a streaming device (or maybe the controller has the device in it), and pay monthly for the whole service. You have to buy the games too?
That is an immediate about-face for me. If they shut down the service then I just stop paying the monthly fee. This is perfectly comfortable for any service. But if I have to buy-in to every game...
So yeah, if they discontinue Stadia it is an open question what happens to the games you purchased on it. They have avoided questions on it, unsurprisingly.
Unless I am misunderstanding, the 4k up-res is happening on Google's side, so it's not like they are skimping on bandwidth.
I suspect they didn't have enough clout with development studios to create that pricing structure.
As an example, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey is $59.99 on Stadia ($39.99 with subscription for 4K). On Steam it's currently $59.99 too, but at 4K without the extra subscription.
Game distribution is a hyper-competitive market right now, with Epic Games in particular giving away high quality games for free every week on their Steam competitor and paying developers up front to get timed exclusives.
I think Google's going to have to re-visit its pricing and customer acquisition model on this one.
But with a requirement for a $400-$1300 graphics card, depending on the FPS and quality you want. And no hope of running it at 4K on most laptops.
Most laptops also don't have 4K screens, so it's a moot point.
I'm not saying their Games strategy will mirror the one taken for Movies, but I'd advice waiting to see what will happen.
I'd expect after a few years of game streaming competition someone will try to undercut the market with a Netflix model.
The stadia controller doesn’t have motion controls.
Those games are useless, who’ll pay $60 for them?
(the subscription is optional, gives you discounts and free games, so it might be a good deal for some people)
Games With Gold are actually free. You need the Gold membership to get them, but you can unsubscribe - they're yours.
Edit: You may be thinking of Game Pass, which behaves in the way you describe.
Who precisely is this concept even marketable to? People with high speed internet, that also can't afford a gaming console?
But can afford a device capable of handling all of the inputs & playback of the video.
So lets low ball and say a $140 chromebook.
+ the cost of the games.
How many people is this? Genuinely.
A second point, sometimes i play coop games with my wife. Its nice not needing 2 consoles or gaming pc's. One can play on the TV and the other on a tablet or cheap laptop.
I game on PC, my kids use PC and consoles, and I can't say that "downloading/installing games" is a significant time sink - and if your network isn't good, Stadia isn't going to work either.
The other thing that I think will break the Stadia business model is that the free access costs Google money unless it recoups the spending on the games. So while we're hearing about reasonably competitive Day 1 prices for games, will we see the pattern of discounting that all other games go through? Second-hand console games?
It just feels like it's aiming at a niche while building out a huge system that's only going to be viable if it achieves mass adoption.
For example, say you want to play a particular new game but don't have the hardware for it. Stadia could be a good option to quickly get to play without having to buy new hardware.
Say I have a decent PC for most days and small games, but I'd like to try the new Forza Horizon because it looks fun. I could very well get it on Stadia. I'm not worried about losing access in 10 years, it's just to have some fun for a few months.
Actually for games with pretty high requirements such as the future Microsoft Flight Simulator, streaming could be the best option for most people.
Unless you have (particularly good) fiber, this probably won't happen. The bandwidth requirements are too high.
> No wasting time downloading/installing games. No patches. Just games ready to play.
FWIW, all of the current generation consoles (even the Switch) have a standby mode that will let them patch your games while you're not playing, meaning that in most cases when you go to play, you can immediately play. They'll even download pre-ordered games without your input.
The only time you would need to be concerned about download times is when you're purchasing a new game for the first time. That's typically a one-time event per game.
On my Xbox I often don't get around to pre-ordering games and there is limited disk space so if I want to play a old game I have to wait again.
And, if I'm a little bit snarky, you can't exactly play those old games on Stadia either.
Maybe there isn't enough high speed internet deployed in the world, but there certainly are a lot of devices capable of streaming given how many people already have an Android or iOS device on them at all times. Both of which support Bluetooth and most modern game controllers. Some of which have better screens than most people have at home. Some of which have better specs than, as just one interesting example, Nintendo's Switch.
For example, a gamer playing on PC and/or XBox might want to play Horizon Zero Dawn for some time, but not buy a PS4 just for one game. Or some Nintendo exclusive game.
Most people don't have all gaming consoles available, and exclusives are (IMHO sadly) a thing, and this might be a reasonable workaround to provide compatibility.
Of course its not available for Mac (yet).
And existing consoles require you to:
* pay a large upfront fee for the hardware
* purchase games at full price
* buy a recurring subscription service for access to updates and essentials, like multiplayer.
Stadia doesn't seem unreasonable at all by comparison.
The game purchase story is identical.
The multiplayer subscription is approximately another ~$4 a month, and includes an average of two new, free, games per month. It's also not required outside of multiplayer.
So, the deal is virtually identical to (or better than) Stadia, but with much more stability in poor internet zones, and the chances of Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo turning off their entire ecosystem are much lower than Google's (they have a positive track record spanning decades on this topic).
You can look at the cost another way: Buying a console is like buying a 5-year pre-paid plan for a subscription service. That puts it in clearer terms, to me.
Anyhow, once Stadia's free version is released, unless its drastically limited in someway, it will be cheaper than everything. Honestly, I don't know why they didn't advertise as a primarily free service. People think of it as a paid service first, that has a crappy free tier, rather than a free service that has a value-add pro tier.
I do agree that if it reaches the point where Stadia allows you to effectively rent a $3k - $4k high end gaming PC for just $10/month, it will become an interesting proposition.
While this is true now, you'll later be able to play games by only paying a monthly fee or only buying the game for the normal <=$60 price. The subscription isn't necessary to play games at all.
The problem you have with the service potentially going away also applies to Steam, to a lesser degree. I acknowledge that they have a proven track record now and also require much less to continue serving games though.
But having a pricier option where you can save your content offline would be a way to satisfy both audiences.
Although in this case, I personally think a pure subscription model should replace the fee + pay-per-game model as the basic streaming option.
There is certainly room to be concerned with what happens to purchases if Google eventually pulls the plug on the whole service.
I think Google is betting that cloud steaming is now viable and are going to put as much resources as possible to make it work.
I am not doubting that there are issues with the product and concerns about Google, I obviously have reservations but don't believe that it hinders me from being excited about the prospect itself
What it's basically saying is "this failed until it succeeded", because the alternative option, that of being able to accurately predict the exact point the technology is 'good enough', has proven effectively impossible to do (given how so many companies that manage it occasionally also fail at it most of the time; it's a crapshoot).
To that end, given Stadia is here, does anyone think the tech is ready? No. In fact, people seem to think the opposite, that Stadia is Google's attempt to get the tech to a specific point, or to offset the cost of the tech serving another use case.
The only way Stadia has a shot is if Google stays viewing it as a way to profit from having unused GPUs sitting around within its cloud offerings.
I love new technology and gadgets. I bought an Oculus DK2 and Vive and they were both mind blowing when I first tried them, although I don’t still use them. Trying Google Glass, on the other hand, was beyond underwhelming. Holo Lens and Magic Leap, while slightly better, were also extremely underwhelming. Other than niche industrial applications, these products are far far too early for any consumer product.
Genuine question: What is innovative here? There are at least a dozen attempts at 'cloud gaming' that I'm aware of dating back about a decade.
The games were not re-engineered / ported specifically to run 'in the cloud' as Stadia is attempting. There are some interesting things that could allow, if a developer ever decides to utilize it.
You pay the one-off cost to buy the console, you then maybe pay for the Pro subscription, but you have to buy your games and those games are locked to that platform - just like with PS/Xbox.
All the other stuff about having games that deliver something unseen before because of "the cloud" are mostly promises and theoretical features at this stage, so I wouldn't bank too much on that.
That's not innovation, it's just having a bigger stick than the other guy.
I'm just one datapoint, I know, but that's also just a keynote.
Cloud gaming needs even lower latency. I don't think it's possible, but if google is doing the serious datacenter work, it must be a testbed for something else, because gaming isn't worth it anyway.
> By 2018, the United States video game industry had matched that of the Unites States film industry on basis of revenue, with both industries having made around US$43 billion that year.
This kind of thing has been around for nearly 10 years.
My regular gaming setup is a 144 Hz monitor with a PC. Everytime I try gaming on a console with a 60 Hz TV I feel like I'm completely drunk because of the noticeable input lag. And that's not even cloud gaming. That's just the Console + TV input lag...
Plus your suggestion can be implemented with cloud compute (a backend behind the UI) - it doesn't need to be cloud streaming.
Microsoft (xCloud). Free until it’s stable.
Nvidia (GeForce NOW). Free until it’s stable.
Sony (PlayStation Now).
.. Seriously dude where’ve you been?
What is important in case of Shadow, GeForce Now and roll you own, that you buy a PC game that you can access on any PC, not just using a single service (like Stadia, or xCloud).
>The OnLive Game Service was launched in the United States on June 17, 2010. The service was launched in the United Kingdom on September 22, 2011.
"PlayStation Now (PS Now) is a cloud gaming subscription service developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment."
Apparently, Microsoft is simply going to rack-mount XBox hardware and stream it that way, which means the entire XBox library is instantly compatible.
For Stadia, games have to be modified specifically for it and their Linux configuration, which limits what games are announced for the platform, and requires engineering effort.
Streaming live and streaming offline media require very different infrastructure.
Google is not the one being innovative here. This has been done before, to no real success. Google was first to the finish line (kinda, seems more like a beta in implementation), but other offerings are coming down the pipe shortly.
I don't see Google winning this one. MS is in a much better position here, and NVidia also has one in the works.
I would short Google on this in an instant if someone would take my money.
I'm sure there are many people who would be happy to take your money to bet against Google.
As-is, Google just happens to be first-to-market in the current generation of on-demand game streaming options. But we've seen this technology before, and I could get the same results with a high quality VPN set-up to connect to a Xbox at home.
There are videos on YouTube of people using Xbox game streaming, but it requires setting up a VPN at home which presumably few people do.
Edit: with the Stadia launch, I'm currently working on setting up a Raspberry PI as a VPN server to try this myself.
Has been a product for a long time and actually works really well.
where do I sign up?
They make great free toys that mostly work and make a lot of money doing so. I'm glad to use those toys for free, but I'm under no allusions that what often works will always work. That's not their forte.
BTW Twitch is a different kind of game streaming.
The innovation is not necessarily in the product but in the engineering required to make the product feasible. There is a long history of tech that simply is too early for the current environment. Google is betting the cloud gaming has reached a point of viability and it's very exciting to see them tackle the challenge.
Obviously there are concerns with the products. Specifically paying for games, the games itself, etc. But generally I'm excited for this effort.
Yet their launch has been plauged by issues and latency is still a massive problem. They didn't crack the nut, so again, what's innovative here?
Nice Freudian slip there. We have a "smart" TV here that's never been connected to the Internet. They seem to just universally suck.
For extra credit, our TV is a Roku TV, and from the CEOs comments, I doubt I'll ever connect it to the Internet. At least until they start coming with 4G connectivity built-in...(!)
But then they come out with some hosted older games. Eh. Maybe the big reveal will come out eventually, but this far it's pretty disappointing.
How about I don't pay the monthly subscription/for the controller and tell Google that "payments improve. Mine will too"?
I'm obviously salty because I preordered Stadia (against my better judgement) and it's terrible.
The overall quality is very beta (black screen in Stadia unless you disable hardware acceleration, which I have to do every time, Stadia can't easily handle multiple Google accounts, I have to change accounts every single time).
Probably worst thing is very Google-like support. Super long queues for "Customer Care", phonelines are closed at 10:30 AM because they're "Out of hours".
Stadia is different, with this product Google is trying something really innovative. For one, the fact that Stadia actually costs money should be a signal of Google's long term ambition here. Yes, Fiber also cost money but was bogged down by the hell that is infrastructure development.
Stadia will require a substantial engineering effort from Google to make this work. The latency and network requirements are a great test to gauge network requirements as we move into 5g, AR, and self driving cars.
Gaming is huge and if Google can be the first to provide (viable) steaming as a service they can really threaten some of the incumbents like Twitch, Sony, Microsoft, etc.
Obviously Google doesn't have the best track record here but I'm excited to see them tackle this challenge.