A 300-400 dollar console isn’t that much of a barrier compared to a 60 AAA video game. This market of people willing to pay premium prices for enthusiast products but is unwilling to pay for the hardware to run them I don’t think exists.

A 300-400 dollar console that's out of stock is a barrier. I still can't go to Amazon and easily buy a PS5, and until recently couldn't have easily bought a high-end GPU, but I could have gone to Stadia and bought any of the (admittedly lacking) selection of games and played immediately, without even waiting to download anything, and on any of several devices I own.

I'm surprised at how many people are discounting what Stadia offered. My reasons for not investing in it are pretty much just data caps and lack of trust in Google.

Any gamer actually looking for a console would have found one through a discord bot in a decent amount of time. No one was about to abandon console gaming because they had to wait a month. Something to also keep in mind is people have friends on these consoles and accounts with achievements they care about.

Alternatively, that same gamer could have just bought the game they want on Stadia and not have any of that hassle to deal with.

Also, I've owned every Playstation since PS2, and I've never played an online multiplayer game on one (with the exception of Journey, which does so silently), nor do I give the slightest damn about achievements.

No one cares if you care. That's completely besides the point.

My point is not that I don't care, or that nobody cares about achievements, it's that not everybody cares about achievements. My point is that Stadia and its equivalents have a place in the market for at least some people.

When I buy a console I usually wait until it’s had some price drops and then there’s really only a few games I want to play. And because I waited so long these too are at a steep discount. These days, that means there’s so much content with DLCs and the base game that it could take me over a year to finish a AAA title.

If I could just play the game and not worry about the hardware, I’d be tempted as long as the service was reliable. Had Stadia become a real business, I’d have jumped on in 5 years or something.

Now that I think about it, Stadia launched into an extremely favourable market where both GPUs and next-gen consoles were unobtainium and 'price drops' are a thing of legend, but they still couldn't make it work. Any other time without that advantage and they'd have failed even harder.

They barely tried though. Did they expect to rival Xbox, Play Station and Nintendo in 2 years with their shitty reputation and without a AAA exclusive game? Were they even prepared to invest in the platform at all?

> Were they even prepared to invest in the platform at all?

They probably spent millions on getting the whole Ubisoft and EA catalogues on Stadia. There was also Red Dead Redemption 2 quite early on, Football Manager 2020, Destiny 2, some Doom, Hitman, Cyberpunk. Not to mention hundreds of indie games. Saying Google didn't invest enough is showing lack of knowledge about the platform.

Thet didn't need an exclusive, that money would have been better spent on convincing more studios to port, marketing. And reassuring potential users with a promise for a refund.

This mindset is pretty outdated, the most popular games now are all free-to-play. I suggest checking out Fortnite (although I personally don’t suggest actually playing it), CoD Warzone, or Overwatch 2. For pre-teens (or almost anyone else for that matter) wanting to try out the free games their friends are playing, a $300+ console is a huge barrier. That’s why they play on their phones.

> I think the idea is that while you still pay $60 for the game, you don’t pay $400 for the console.

But you own the console for life, whereas a game on Stadia is known to disappear at any moment (because we know google will drop it).

This model has been tried many times in gaming, and has never succeeded

If I were to rent a game for say 10 dollars play it and be done with it that would make me jump on it. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense

But who has good enough internet for this service and no console?

I bought it, heavily discounted, after having sold my ps4 and wanting something to play very infrequently. The service was spotty despite having gigabit fiber and mesh wifi in my house. As an infrequent gamer, I'm likely the worst possible customer archetype for google.

That was my experience. (I tried it for a free trial). Graphics were poor and input lag was abysmal (and made a lot of types of games unplayable).

I never had much trouble with input lag or dropouts. Perhaps region-specific?

I still didn't see any value in Stadia though. The cloud-only full-price approach was the main issue (GeForce Now had them beat there), but also their investment in hardware has been pitiful, so you're effectively playing at low graphics settings. Rather than addressing that, they chased the 4K buzzword. The kind of gamers who insist on 4K aren't the kind who want to use cloud gaming services. GeForce Now understood this, Stadia didn't.

Incidentally Google were sued for supposedly misleading promotion of their 4K support: https://www.pcgamer.com/stadias-4k-gaming-claims-come-back-t...

I have college friends on the east coast who all said it worked great for them. The they all commented that it was better on ethernet. The mesh Wi-Fi kits that everyone loves now add noticeable latency.

Something like Shadow PC makes way more sense, and is why I choose it. It’s just a cloud PC, and even supports SteamVR.

But that's really focused on long term commitments.

First they had an almost year-long waiting list. Now you have to pay a hefty commissioning fee.

For me that makes no sense as a cloud setup. The benefit of cloud is paying when you need it (like when I travel and didn't bring my PC) and not when I don't need it.

Stadia did offer that but because you had to pay for the games it also wasn't worthwhile.

I use plutosphere now for VR when I'm traveling and that's great and not too expensive. Still a bit buggy and slow to boot the machines though.

I think you misunderstand Shadow. It’s just a cloud PC. Any games you buy are unrelated to Shadow. You can stop paying whenever you want, and the games are still yours. You just reinstall them when you start up you Shadow subscription again. This is what I do. If you buy a physical gaming PC at any point, you just install your games into it, rather than Shadow.

And, there hasn’t been a waitlist for some time now. At least in California. I was up and running within 30 minutes of starting my subscription, and can cancel any time.

And, regardless of the exact implementation, the Shadow approach is infinitely more desirable to me than the complete lock in, and limited selection, of Stadia.

I know what Shadow PC is. But they now have an 'activation fee' that costs 1 month of use - $30 (currently waived but it will be imposed soon). That means if you just want to use it for 1 month (e.g. during a holiday) you will have to pay for 2 months. It applies every time you reactivate a paused account too!

And yes I know you use your own games.. But it's not suited for casual use for me. I use plutosphere instead. That's only intended for VR but that's all I use anyway :) Plutosphere is also a "PC in the cloud" but you pay $2 per hour and a $10 monthly fee if you want persistent storage. No sign-up fees though. But its pricing is pretty ideal for holidays, whereas Shadow PC is now completely unviable for that with the activation fee.

> It’s just a cloud PC

With the associated UX of manually logging in, handling disk space, waiting for installations and updates, etc. etc. etc.

The trade off is that the hundreds of games that I previously bought can be played, there’s no censorship or artificial restrictions in the game stores, and any games I buy in the future won’t be lost to the collapse of a single service, since I can just reinstall them on any other PC (cloud or not). Personally, that’s worth the minor inconvenience of an update screen. And, this is an implementation detail. Shadow could easily provide scheduled updates for Windows, and Steam/whatever popular store games.

> manually logging in

You should try shadow. You just open the Shadow app in whatever device, it boots, and you’re in. No login.

You do have to boot with a different device, first for VR with their Quest app (implementation detail of the Beta) or Virtual Desktop (required).

> You should try shadow. You just open the Shadow app in whatever device, it boots, and you’re in. No login.

You have to login to each and every store (Steam, Epic, Ubi, etc.) you want to play games with.

> there’s no censorship or artificial restrictions in the game stores

As of now. Some games' ToS already state you can't play them remotely, and technically Shadow would be in violation of that. It's enough for EA or whatever to threaten to sue them and they might implement restrictions.

I agree that the flexibility and continued ownership of the games is a massive bonus.

> you want to play games with.

Once, as you also need to do when booting up your a console for the first time.

Do the kinds of people shelling out $60 for a game find the $500 console a big barrier?

I think so: People who played video games as kids, don't really have much time for them now, and don't really want to go through the effort of even figuring out which console to get and setting it up, but occasionally get curious about a particular game. Maybe they don't even have an obvious place in the house for a console, if they only have wall-mounted smart TVs with nothing hooked up to them, or maybe they don't want to give their own young kids console games yet, which is hard to do with a PlayStation in the living room.

It's probably possible to turn some of these people into regular gamers with a service like Stadia. But a lot of them won't buy many games, and those that do might bite the bullet and go out and buy a console, so probably not the best audience for a product?

> go through the effort of even figuring out which console to get and setting it up

There are effectively 3 consoles and it takes about a minute to set it up.

They don't strike me as common reasons to choose Stadia.

Modern consoles take way longer to setup than they used to. Playing a game on PS5 requires installing it, plus usually patches. I think you're giving consoles too much credit for ease of use.

> Playing a game on PS5 requires installing it, plus usually patches.

Which happens once and requires no intervention from the user.

The rest of the time it's as simple as take DVD out of box and put in drive.

Yeah, "once", as in the first time, as in the "setup" process.

If you meant "setup" as in literally just playing a game you've already setup, then sure, that can be fairly quick, but still not as quick as Stadia was.

Not only are there only three consoles, I bet I could set up any of the three faster than setting up stadia.

Yeah, and it seems stadia was more difficult to setup than a console.

But you need a high quality internet connection instead.