Xcloud or Geforcenow offer the best of both worlds. You "own" (in whatever sense you can "own" the game) the game and you have the choice where you want to play it. Not at home/cheap notebook? No problem. With Stadia you can only stream the game.

The question for me is if it works on a cheap notebook or on the road, why wouldn't you just want to play it this way even when you are at home? Why do I want to own anything? I just want to play the games I bought.

> Why do I want to own anything?

Because Stadia offers an inferior experience to local rendering. In particular, the way the video compression crushes all dark colors into a single shade of black. Plus, when Google kills Stadia in a year, you'll have lost the games you purchased and paid a subscription fee for.

I was excited to see Google make a game that would only be possible on Stadia, be it an MMO, races with hundreds of cars, or something more creative their designers could imagine. With their internal developers shut down, all that's left is more expensive, inferior quality versions of games I could play elsewhere.

Stadia doesn't need to be better than local rendering, it just needs to let me play my game with an acceptable quality. I'm not 100% satisfied with the current quality and I'd like it to improve, but as I grow older I'm more interested in experiencing the game's content rather than worrying about how superior my resolution/PQ/fps is. I don't care if I lose the games I purchased 2 years ago, once I've played the game for a while I'm done with it, I'm not interested in continuously revisiting old games over and over again.

Honestly, I'm sick of the limitations of traditional gaming. If that means some compression quality loss and being somewhat inferior to local rendering, then that's the price I'm willing to pay. Playing games is not one of the most important parts of my life, but with the amount of crap I've put up with dealing with flexibility and compatibility issues of a superior local rendering setup for modern games, you might think it was.

Because playing with video compression, a max of 60fps and added latency is not ideal.

That's a fair point. I take this as being similar to reading a book on an iPad vs a kindle. Sure I can read a book on an iPad, but a kindle gives me a better "book experience". Streaming games is like reading a book on an iPad. Owning a PC or console is like reading the book on a device that is better suited for the format.

That analogy probably lands differently for different people. I haven’t used Stadia and don’t have a strong opinion of it. (But I’m open to it - my normal gaming approach is along the lines of XKCD 606 - I’m currently working through my PS3 library.) However, I find reading books on an iPad to be viscerally unpleasant, even though an iPad is my primary mobile computing device.

Not possible with Stadia. You have to buy the games again to stream them.

Why? Probably less latency/better quality with a PC.

Is Cyberpunk better on a PC or better on Stadia? I've heard it's the best to play on Stadia.

Cyberpunk on Stadia is the PC version, it's just running on hardware in a server farm somewhere, rather than under your desk. Afaik they didn't make any meaningful Stadia specific changes to it.

Obviously it depends on how well your local hardware compares to Stadias server farm too.

The PC and Stadia versions are much better than the PS4 and Xbox One versions though - those do not run well at all.

I suspect the actual PS5 and Xbox Series X versions will be relatively similar to the PC/Stadia version, but they haven't been released yet - you can only play the last gen console versions via backwards compatibility.

Madden isn’t available on GeForce Now apparently, but besides that I don’t think you’ve explained why Stadia is better. On Stadia and GeForce Now, you pay a subscription fee and pay for the game. Is it something about the Stadia hardware that makes it better?

Yes. Stadia does not assume you know how to use a gaming PC. Steam and Epic might be fine if you already know what those things are. If you don't, it is far too complex. Billions of people understand the simple app store model that comes with their phone. It's the one stadia uses.

Steam and Epic are literally app stores. I guess you have to link an extra account to use it with GeForce Now? For that minuscule amount of extra friction you get access to a much larger set of games on stores that won’t shut down when Google gets bored in a year or two.

edit: in what way does Steam or Epic expect you to understand how to use a “gaming PC”?

In the way that those are apps that gamers install on their gaming pc.

You're not making any sense to me. Steam is just an app store. A "gaming PC" is just a regular PC with more powerful hardware in it, using software on it does not take any special skills specific to gaming PCs.

And as the other commenter points out, playing steam games via geforce now doesn't even require installing the steam app anyway, it's just an account link.

I am struggling to find an analogy but here goes. I think it's like the difference between a console in the cloud v/s a gaming pc in the cloud. For casual gamers, a console in the cloud with minimal configuration - switch it on and start playing - makes the most sense. If GeForce Now is a hosted gaming PC, I assume running a Windows O/S, it likely has the same configuration overhead of PC games, which most casual gamers don't want to deal with.

Can you elaborate? You don’t need to install Steam or the game to play that game on GeForce Now.

Have you ever used Steam on Geforce Now? There is absolutely no friction. You do not even have to know Steam exists. You just search for the game you want, and do one more sign-up.

I have. I used Geforce now, stadia, luna. I bought the hardware controllers. I've tried all of these platforms across all different form factors (pcs, laptop, ipads, iphones, android, LG television). I've signed up for individual games, game publisher channels UBISoft+. I invest millions of dollars into companies and my thesis is product driven. All of this is research I conduct myself, for myself. That isn't to say these services have gotten better since I last tested (Geforce i probably tested in November). From what I remember, it was a PC virtual machine with a queue system for availability. It wasn't "magic". Stadia is magic. Luna is somewhere in between.

On Stadia, you just have to pay for the game. The subscription just unlocks HD and some free games. The fact that few people are aware of this really highlights how terribly Google marketed this.