> You had to sub + pay for the game too. And some of them were exclusives too.

It's showing how much Google failed with Stadia, people still don't know how the service worked. You paid for the games to stream them, and optionally there was a subscription for better quality and free games. Also you could link Ubisoft+ to stream their games for "free", and there were free to play games.

And there were only time limited "exclusives", which were only indie games. Nothing to do with actual Xbox/PS only exclusives.

I mean paying for a game and then getting a low quality version of it without a sub isn't very compelling to a lot of PC gamers if I am being honest.

It was 1080p on the free version and 4k on the paid version.

I thought this was a stupid understanding of graphical fidelity anyway, when render settings are probably gonna be more important than 1080p vs 4k (and we know some games were set to play at essentially medium graphics settings), and the video compression algorithms the games were being run through to stream them wrecked quality regardless of if you were playing in 4k or not.

1080p vs 4k is a huge difference, that's pretty amusing. Also what about someone with an ultra-wide monitor such as myself at 1440p? Overall it's just terrible, and good riddance it failed.

I think when you're using a desktop OS with tiny high-res icons and fonts, then higher res beyond 1080p matters. But for video games they generally have big fonts and icons because they're made keeping in mind a lot of people will be viewing them on a TV from across the living room.

In most cases a higher framerate or better bitrate would be a more improved experience than more pixels.

> This is actually incredibly funny reading because Google Stadia was 100% worse than Xbox Cloud. You had to sub + pay for the game too. And some of them were exclusives too.

It's also incredibly irrelevant, Google is not the ones being investigated here, and Stadia has also been shut down so it's not relevant at all how much better or worse it is.

The question is not which platform is better or worse, but if Microsoft could potentially abuse their position if the merger goes through.

I recommend you to either read the final report (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/644939aa529ed...) or the summary of the final report (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6448f377814c6...). Probably the summary is a bit easier to digest, as it's 20 pages rather than 418 pages, but it has all the information you need to understand the case, as most news sources don't go into much depth.

Is is Microsoft's fault that they don't have any competent competition? It's not like they somehow squeezed Stadia out of the market...

No, but that's not the regulator's problem either. It's not as if there is some sacrosanct right for companies to merge that is being abrogated. The entire existence of a company is at the pleasure of government.

Is that meant to be a good thing?

That's meant to be an explanation of how things are without making a value judgment. For-profit corporations are not people with human rights, they are amoral impersonal constructs, legitimized entirely by the state, intended to serve the economy. If they are not doing that adequately, for instance, by introducing monopolization concerns on a market, their behavior can be arbitrarily restricted.

Preferable to the reverse (unless you're American I suppose).

>You had to sub + pay for the game too.

You didn't. You just had to sub to get access to the "free" games + play at resolutions higher than 4K + other stuff. After you bought the game, you could just stream it at 1080p.