If Stadia were just a monthly subscription and you could play all the games, it wouldn't be hard to swallow because they just stop charging you when the service goes down and you got your value out of it while you had it.

It's the "purchasing" of the digital good that's the problem because you loose access to something that you think you "own" when in fact it's more of a lease.

I understand the confusion around Stadia pricing tiers, but if you buy a game on the service you can play it without any monthly fee.

It's comparable to the lease you make with Valve with the expectation of Steam being around forever.

There wasn’t any confusion. Their point was they’d much rather pay a monthly fee, because as it is, paying full price to “own” a Stadia game is ridiculous because Stadia is going to end up dead like most other google services and all the games you “own” will likely disappear.

The problem is that Valve doesn't have a history of just cancelling their products and shutting their customers out. Google does, and an extensive one. So when they offer a service where you can buy software and said software will only work for as long as Stadia is around, I don't trust Google that service will exist in 3 years. And once it finally dies what will Google do? Give everyone AdWord vouchers?

Except on steam, you can install your purchases locally. So you can probably play them directly (Hmm..I should try and see)

'member when Google threw away their innovative social network in order to break the "+" boolean search operator?