Quick disclaimer, I am a Google shill who has tried both services. Overall I prefer GeForce Now slightly, I think Stadia does have some advantages. Whether or not they're worth it depends on your use case. GFN works great to supplement a gaming PC when you're traveling or laying in bed, but has some deal breakers that keep it from being the main way I play games.

If you use the free version of Stadia, it's the same resolution as GFN. If you're a monthly subscriber, the picture quality is much better than GFN because GFN doesn't support resolutions higher than 1920x1080. GFN is REALLY frustrating if you have a 1920x1200 or 1440p monitor. Because of this, GFN can complement my gaming PC (like when traveling with a crappy laptop) but never replace it. Stadia probably could replace my gaming PC if I was willing to buy the subscription.

No waiting period (its rare, but there's occasionally a wait for GeForce Now even with the founders edition)

Games don't disappear from the service like they sometimes do with GeForce Now (granted, if a game you bought disappears in GFN you can still install locally so this may be a win for GFN as long as Steam's cloud saves don't glitch on you)

Stadia doesn't require you to install a 200 megabyte app (assuming you already have Chrome installed)

GFNs video clip feature is a bit buggy for me compared to Stadia although I haven't used those features enough to tell if GFN is consistently glitchy or if I'm just unlucky with the NVidia overlay

The UI for GFN feels clunkier to me but I suppose that's personal opinion. It feels more like VPNing into a really locked down PC, where you'll hear Windows sound effects when there's errors and if a game crashes you're stuck with a Steam error and you have to restart the whole app and wait in a queue to play again. Stadia feels a bit more well-integrated to me.

I tried Stadia and it worked fine, but I own games on steam and given the size of the Google graveyard there’s no way in hell I’m going to “buy” a game on a service that will get shitcanned in a month. 1080p isn’t great, but I’m not a huge gamer and $5 is a steal.

GeForce Now supports browsers now too. Including Safari on iOS.

I think they're pretty even now for the user, but Stadia has some pretty big business advantages long term that may already be evident in that GeForce Now has queues and Stadia doesn't. The main thing is Nvidia probably doesn't have as much work it can do on machines that aren't being used, whereas the Stadia machines can probably be doing useful work even when the gamers are all sleeping. Stadia can therefore justify having way more capacity than is usually needed, which means having more machines closer to users (lower latency) and being able to deal with peaks better. For everything cloud-related, scale is such a big advantage it seems like it'll be hard long term for Nvidia to compete with Microsoft, Amazon, or Google.

Stadia also doesn't have to pay the Windows tax

Does GeForce run on nvidia’s own equipment end to end?

> I don’t see anything stadia offers over GeForce now.

One advantage is that you can play Cyberpunk for free on Stadia (after you purchase the game, which you also have to do for GFN too). Also, last I tried GFN, it seemed a bit clunkier (it felt like more of a "PC on cloud" that you managed, vs a built for web service).

Disclaimer: I work at Google, though not on Stadia.

$5/mo is as close to free as you can get and if I ever decide to get a gaming PC in the future I don’t have to buy Cyberpunk again. If stadia could play games I own independently I’d be all for it, but why risk investing in something that will almost certainly get shut down, if only because I’m far from the only person making this calculation.

One thing in the works is game studio subscriptions. UBISoft has this already and I've signed up for 14.99. Right now it is only supported over Luna (Amazon's streaming game service) but Stadia support is coming soon. For large studios this model makes a lot of sense. I would use it for EA Sports as well. I don't need to "own" the game, but I do want to own a relationship with the publisher that will let me play their game anywhere. It'll be interesting to see how major consoles react to this where licensing doesn't really let publishers give their own direct user's access to titles on the console. I can see game streaming being a big win for publishers and a big loss for consoles which are essentally middle men.

Yeah that makes sense. As they start making more money from in game ads and user tracking I suspect that subsidy may make subscriptions more profitable on publisher end as well.