google gaming

i don't think being first is important for this, the important thing is having the best spread of games after the spin-up period.

there's gonna be a point in about 2-3 years where blockbuster games stop releasing on the current consoles and 100mil people are gonna have to decide between this and buying a new $400 box, that's an important inflection point

my mind is sort of boggling at the tech. it's going to be like playing a high end PC by the sounds of it? I'm too luddite to really grok all this

yeah the specs on their cloud instances are around what i'd expect the PS5 to be when that shows up next year

the other open question is whether google can bully ISPs into letting customers actually use this for more than like 50 hours a month, it uses way more bandwidth than netflix

right, rather than having the $400 to buy the console being the critical point for a buyer, it'll be having an ace net connection without limits. probably google would like to provide such connections.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-11-18-google-stadias-bizarre-business-model-means-its-swimming-upstream-at-launch

Mortal Kombat 11 costs fifty quid. I can get NetherRealm's wonderful fighting game for under thirty quid from Amazon. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which came out over a year ago, also costs fifty quid. That's under twenty quid on Amazon. Kine is twenty quid, whereas it's £16 on the Epic Games store. Red Dead Redemption 2 is £54.99 on Stadia. I can get Rockstar's cowboy epic from Amazon for just over £40.

These Stadia prices are, clearly, in-line with the cost of games on the likes of the PlayStation Store. But Stadia doesn't feel like it should be compared to the PlayStation Store. Or any other store for that matter. It feels like it should be compared to the likes of Sony's PlayStation Now, Microsoft's Game Pass and, more recently, Project xCloud - and compared to those subscriptions, Stadia is dead in the water. I wince at the thought of what happens to Stadia next year when Microsoft plugs xCloud into Game Pass.

Stadia Pro is the only real hope this project has of success, but at launch just two games are included with the subscription: fighting game Samurai Shodown and Bungie shooter Destiny 2, the latter of which is free-to-play on other platforms anyway. Google promises games will be added to Stadia Pro's library regularly, but it really needs to get its skates on if it wants to sell the sub when the three months that come free with the Founder's Edition run dry. As it stands, Stadia owners are paying a subscription to access the free-to-play Destiny 2. It makes no sense.

So, what we're faced with when Stadia comes out tomorrow, 19th November 2019, is a launch lineup of games, doubled last minute by a panicked Google, that you must pay premium prices for and that includes just one exclusive: Gylt. There are plenty of fantastic games here, such as Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Final Fantasy 15, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Football Manager 2020, but little to convince someone to invest in Stadia instead of a PS4 or an Xbox One. Stadia does not have a killer app.

yeah the fact that the subscription just buys you access to the cloud and then you have to buy the games on top of that is ???

it's like renting a console except you can't also rent the games, you have to buy them at full MSRP

doesn't sound like they're intending to really roll this out just yet but they set a time so here we go