This. Stadia is about convenience and price not about bringing a 'new' gaming experience with exclusive titles and what not. This will be the first time in over 10 years I will be able to play up to date games as it just doesn't make sense to me to buy hardware dedicated for gaming if it costs more than a chrome cast and a controller.
IMHO if you assume it'll be ephemeral but will still benefit then this is the service for you. I'm in the same place you are: I don't have the time, energy, interest or space to invest in a powerful gaming computer. Investing in a machine that'll take up space and power for the few times I can spend playing a game just doesn't make sense for me. At present I can either chose to go without or go with Stadia.
To be honest I think Nintendo has the low power, low end gaming market locked up with the Switch and people who love to game will have a mix of consoles and possibly PCs. Even so I think there's a swath of people in the middle who aren't interested in buying a console but want something more powerful than a Switch. I don't understand complaints about the cost of using Stadia since the Xbox and PS4 also require subscriptions to make the most of the devices.
What's interesting to me is if actual 5g (not marketing 5g) becomes a reality then it becomes easier to be untethered from an ISP. I doubt Google considers it much of a market but think of minimalists: van campers, small house types and people who simply want to reduce clutter.
Completely agree. I want to play new AAA games on high settings but I have very little time to do so, so I can't really justify buying an expensive gaming computer. But if I only have to buy the games it's a different matter.
This should do a lot to lower the barrier of entry and greatly expand the market for the most advanced games.
But you won't be playing the games on high settings. You'll be playing them on the equivalent of a mid tier computer with extra lag. The article goes into this in depth about how degraded the quality of play is. You have to pay for access and the games as well as have a device locally that stream. It's really barely going to be cheaper than an Xbox and give you significantly less performance.
> You have to pay for access and the games as well as have a device locally that stream.
Only if you want 4K. For 1080P, you just buy a game as a product.
> It's really barely going to be cheaper than an Xbox and give you significantly less performance.
I agree that for the 4K Chromecast option to make any sense, it must be much cheaper than a conventional console. They would have done well to find a way to support existing (and cheaper) Chromecasts too.
There's also the PC gaming market though. Stadia will reach PC gamers on all desktop OSs, no additional hardware needed. There could be a market for people with laptops, for instance.
Incidentally, we've seen all this before with OnLive and PlayStation Now, which people seem to have largely forgotten about - nothing Google is doing here is new. OnLive functioned as both a microconsole, and an application on Windows/Mac/Android.
You can also buy a business laptop with an embedded Quaddro and have the same sit in the chair experience at that moderate graphics level without much difficulty. In a lot of ways some of the recent generations for Intel embedded graphics have been baseline requirements for many games (mostly driven by F2P and MMO games) and you don't even need a real GPU just to play vs. having a AAA ultrahigh setting experience. I mean if I can beat Dark Souls on a $300 staples laptop and enjoy the ride I don't see where these grandiose requirements are coming from.
If there were more PC exclusive games that were truly GPU required monsters I could see the point of Stadia, but as time has progressed most AAA games that end up targeting PC usually have a generous minimum requirement threshold, and often its so generous that most things can actually do the job. The only place where the GPUs have been really required in the last few years is the VR stuff which because of general latency of input/response for Stadia would probably cause a lot more motion sickness in people than a local system. Stadia's benefit is capturing the kind of user that doesn't care about quality (because if you did you'd just buy that tower), but those are the kind of users that would make do with what they already had anyway for cheap.
In my opinion this feels like the same slow death as OnLive, with even less benefit in knowing that OnLive's entire focus was on streaming gaming rather than Google who would put this product on ice in 3 years.
Doesn’t it make more sense if google buys this gpu and shares it among, say, 50 users who have maximum an hour of gaming every week? It almost certainly has to be cheaper sharing hardware among users instead of having each single user owning a piece of hardware which is idle almost all of the time. Unless of course hardware price is neglect-able with respect to game price.
The equilibrium cost of sharing the hardware vs owning will probably be similar... the main difference here is that you're also playing with noticeable latency for fast action games which, even if you play infrequently, will impact the game play of certain games.
i'm interested how this will work at peak times, when everybody gets back from work and wants to play? or for new releases. are they just going to throw money at it and be massively over-provisioned most of the time?
Sure, there are lot of scenarios how this could fail and I might be a bit optimistic, but the idea just makes sense. If stadia doesn’t work out sooner or later there will be a platform that will work.
