That would make sense if Stadia was targeted at casuals (high school students probably can't afford AAA).

However, the lack of subscriptions, separate purchase model, lack of discoverability (no search bar for years! from the Search company!) and porting model make it clear Stadia was very much not targeted at casuals.

AAA games are targeted at casuals.

No, phone games are targeted at casuals. AAA games are targeted at people who have some 40-60 hours of spare time over the next three weeks to spend on video games.

This is coming from someone who now has no free time for video games, and only plays indie roguelikes because AAA games are too much of a time commitment to ever finish.

Casual is a nebulous term, but perhaps "widely accessible" is easier to evaluate. We can measure accessibility by games sold.

By sales, the highest-selling games are [1] Minecraft (now AAA), Grand Theft Auto V (AAA), EA Tetris, PUBG (before becoming freemium), Mario games, Pokémon, Terraria, and Red Dead Redemption 2.

So by sales, the vast majority of top-selling games are AAA. For what it's worth, I think similarly to you about preferring indie games to AAA games due to lack of time. But for most gamers and people in general, I don't think people even calculate the 40-60 hours per week. Most players probably just spend a lot of free time and weekend days gaming, and then the hours add up.

You do have a point that a large number of players play free-to-play games (e.g. League of Legends and many phone games), but there's a fair argument that AAA games are also targeted at "casual players," by evidence of their wide popularity in terms of massive sales numbers.

[1] https://gamertweak.com/most-played-popular-games/

> AAA games are too much of a time commitment to ever finish

AAA game industry agrees with you, releasing mega titles like Halo w/o a story to finish, just online "service game" that will always be there for you (until they shut the service off).

I thought one of the selling points of Stadia was it would let you play games that need a $500 graphics card, without buying a $500 graphics card.

And in my mind, those are enthusiast games, because only enthusiasts are spending $500 on a graphics card.

And yet it mostly launched with games that I could play on my 5-year old $200 GPU that I probably couldn't even sell for scrap at this point. People really overestimate how much of a GPU you need to play a lot of these games. Sure, if you have a 4k monitor and you want to play at 144hz then sure, but at that point you've spent $2000 on the monitor, so what's $500 on the CPU.

And if you're willing to take upscaled resolutions like Stadia offers then you can typically go below the minimum specs (which are themselves far below recommended). Direct X versions are more likely to be a blocker than simply not being able to maintain a framerate.

Exactly but the barrier to entry is price. Most indie games targeted at non casual gamers will run on potato PCs.

Highschool students are a primary demographic for AAA.

I think that stuff is just bad product work and BD