It's worth remembering that Google tried this with Stadia, with levels of investment unimaginable for a regular startup and a product that was superior in many ways (instant games! no hardware requirements!), and still failed.
Of course you can Monday morning quarterback this and point out Stadia's limitations (weak games library, hurr durr Google Reader, etc), but still, the cards were stacked in their favor and they still couldn't pull it off.
I work at Google and I was immediately skeptical of Stadia (I don't work on that product, obviously). Partly from being a gamer myself, thinking about latency, but also because:
* Google has a reputation for abandoning services, and games bought on Stadia would be locked there. What happens if/when Stadia goes under? Who knows, but there's a decent chance of, "tough shit, all your games are gone."
* It's hard to get momentum when you're targeting hardcore gamers, who mostly already have consoles/PC's, thus removing one of your biggest advantages.
The whole setup just hardly makes any sense. They are targeting people who have super fast and reliable internet, are hardcore gamers, and don't have a gaming pc. I just can't imagine who this target market is. Fast hardware is usually much more accessible than fast internet.
The idea might have worked if the subscription included access to games. Since at least then you aren't buying in to the platform with lock in.
I think you are wrong on the hardcore gamer part. There are something between casual and hardcore gamers (but that market might not be big enough).
I used to be a hardcore gamer but being in my forties with kids and job I dont have the time to game as much as I used to. The whole just stream the game, no fiddling with installs and patches were very tempting to me. Given that I dont game as much it would be nice not paying for a beefy gaming PC. I already have great internet, I need it for work.
I also have two preteens that are starting to game, its cheaper to get multiple stadia subscrptions that they can then play where they want, on my macbook, the TV or a cheap chromebook.
I think google's biggest mistake was requiring you to buy the controller up front. If they had let people sign up with just their existing PC it would have been much easier to get people onboard.
i have a similar situation, used to game a lot of friends, lots of us have kids now, would like to game 3-4 times a year. Dont want to bother getting a full on game setup, and I have a macbook for daily use, so not very gaming friendly. Decent streaming setup would be perfect.
This could be a lot of people with a business or Apple laptop living far from home - business trips, expats, migrants. I had to migrate recently and currently have only a work laptop with me, so I have tried Stadia and it was rather good for some games. Best example - ESO, which for 10$ pulled all my progress and DLCs from the cloud. But yes, with the Google "reputation" and the requirement to re-buy all games the second time Stadia is dead in the water, I won't invest there anything above a few dollars.
Have you ever tried GeForce Now? Similar or better performance than Stadia, but it just uses your existing Steam library.
It's a separate subscription (free to $20/mo) for the streaming service, but you can play many of your current titles without re-buying them (not all, due to publisher withdrawals).
To play ALL your games, Shadow.tech will stream a full GPU-enabled desktop that you can run anything you want in.
There are many of us who grew up in the 90s and 2000s and used to have gaming PCs (because that's all there were those days). Nowadays we have jobs and much less time or space or money to keep up with that all the time any more, but being able to drop in for a couple of hours of cloud gaming here and there is awesome.
I was able to loan friends my GeForce Now account so we could play something together (they didn't have a gaming PC). And streaming doesn't imply lock-in; GeForce Now just uses your Steam library, Shadow just streams you a virtual Windows desktop (with whatever software you want to install on it, you essentially have root).
If you live in a city, fast (enough) internet is like $50/mo and you need it for your work/TikTok anyway. A good gaming PC is like $1500-$2000+ and is noisy and hot and Windows is a pain to keep updated, etc.
I'm not saying game streaming is the future or that it will replace traditional PCs, but it's definitely a useful service!
If latency wasn't an issue, I could see it as a luxury/convenience thing. Pay for the top tier experience, don't have to manage your own hardware, including the weirdness and annoyances you get into sometimes with PC gaming.
But latency is an issue, so the experience will always be inferior in terms of responsiveness. Which, to a lot of gamers, means it would have to be a budget option, not a luxury one.
I think the latency part depends a lot on the games. I have used stadia and geforce now and for single player games I cant feel any latency difference.
I have tried playing multiplayer games like CS:GO on geforce now, and that gave me latency issues and was not a great experience.
There are plenty of people whose only computer is a non-gaming laptop. Or even an iPad.
Hell, I'm a developer in my 40s, and I only got a decent-ish gaming PC at the start of the pandemic.
Stadia could be amazing if Google had any interest in it. Even OnLive of 10 years ago was amazing. LiquidSky knocked everyone out of the park, but had licensing issues unfortunately (play unmodified Steam games in the cloud what?!).
There are plenty of people who don't want to invest hundreds of dollars in consoles and gaming PCs but who still play plenty of games. Apple understands that with their Apple Arcade, but Apple doesn't understand gaming. Google doesn't understand gaming either.
Stadia had (has?) free games each month that remain on your account as long as you're subscribed. So in that way, it is. It just doesn't provide the huge library that XBGP does.
The monthly fee was for 4k and other features that weren't necessary. You could stream anything you bought on Stadia for free at 1080p, no subscription.
It was like buying a game and getting a console for free, but with an optional upcharge for an even better console.
The marketing for all this was horrible. People still don't understand what Stadia was and wasn't. And the launch was limited to people willing to spend $130 for the custom hardware.
That hardware wasn't necessary. They just decided to do that at launch as a way to milk some gamers of their money in return for early access.
But again, the marketing was horrible. And the free access came many months later. For a system that it's best feature was the free streaming access, they completely destroyed it at launch.
And of course, as everyone pointed out back then, Google doesn't support the things they create unless they're related to advertising somehow. And they've already shut down all the studios they created to make games for Stadia.
And the big "wow" feature that they kept advertising, "negative latency", never got released. Many thought it was already in it, so the latency that Stadia has was very disappointing compared to the hype that Google gave it.
It's just a disaster from start to finish, marketing-wise.
Maybe with the sky high 4090 pricing it would make more sense for gamers to go to the cloud. But then they'd be expecting 4k high resolution streams on 4090s which might mean high COGS anyway.
> What happens if/when Stadia goes under? Who knows, but there's a decent chance of, "tough shit, all your games are gone."
This had now been answered [1]:
> We will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia Store.
IMHO, as a gamer too, Stadia sucks not because it's streaming (the other streaming services are great for when I'm not on my desktop) but because Google totally botched its execution. Terrible pricing compared to Steam and other resellers, no crossplay, no mods, tiny library. And I think their architecture required specific ports from developers, vs GeForce Now's one-checkbox integration.
Game streaming isn't for everyone, but there IS a market for it. In that market, though, Stadia is by far the worst offering. They should've had gamers lead its design and development, but they run it like it's some sort of business cloud offering... just totally missed the culture.
I work in the games industry, and honestly I don't know anyone who was optimistic about Stadia. Some people thought no chance, others thought that Google would care enough to keep pushing it for many years and keep spending unlimited money to maybe find success, and I didn't hear from anyone who thought better than that.
Of course I'm not claiming to speak for everyone in the industry, just for people in my network who I either discussed it with or whose opinions I saw online. But it very much isn't the case that everyone predicted success until "Monday morning quarterback"ing.
I wanted to try Stadia. My Google account hails from 2004, when GMail first came out. I am in good standing, and consume a lot of Google services, many of which I pay for.
Stadia would just not accept any credit card I threw at them, including a virtual card I created specifically for this service after the other ones failed. It also even refused those which Google happily uses to charge me for my GWS and YouTube Premium.
It was not a geolocation thing - Stadia happily serviced a neighbour.
Under these circumstances, I gave up. If you make it hard for me to give you money, I simply won't.
You are greatly dismissing the limitations. The technical challenge the met was the bare minimum to start building any kind of credibility to attract consumer, they knew it, and they did it. But still it was the bare minimum.
Once you have the platform, the bare minimum, you can start trying to get customer. You do that by playing on price, quality (within your platform parameters), catalog and since it's subscription base, long term commitment. Basically, either it was a hit, or they had to accept bleeding a lot of money to finalize their market entry.
They didn't push much and price and catalog, and they didn't commit either, as everyone expected.
They pull off a tech demo, they were never serious on the gaming market, and it showed.
The business model was stupid. You paid a subscription for the benefit of being able to buy games on the platform, with you couldn’t access without the subscription. And all of this only works with amazing internet and for games where latency isn’t an issue.
>You paid a subscription for the benefit of being able to buy games on the platform, with you couldn’t access without the subscription.
This was only true during the first five months of release, when you had to buy the Founder's Edition, which came with hardware to access the service. All purchased games can be accessed without the subscription via Stadia Base, and they planned it this way from the start[1]. Stadia Pro primarily provides the perk of running games on better cloud hardware, providing a 4K HDR surround sound stream instead of the baseline 1080p stereo stream.
Google never cared about Stadia or marketed it much.
GeForce Now, Luna, PSNow, XCloud, etc. are doing much better. Stadia is just the neglected stepchild of game streaming, not representative of the overall health of the technology.
I should note that Google by no means invented game streaming. OnLive did it ten years ago, and today there are still other small providers like Shadow.tech, Parsec, Paperspace...
I think Nvidia has the real advantage here though, being the only ones who can produce those gfx cards at datacenter scale. Unless one of the other providers want to develop their own chips, they're always at the mercy of Nvidia. Even during the COVID GPU shortage, Nvidia was able to keep GeForce Now sustained with enough hardware while the other providers struggled... Shadow had a waitlist of several months, for example.
Of course you can Monday morning quarterback this and point out Stadia's limitations (weak games library, hurr durr Google Reader, etc), but still, the cards were stacked in their favor and they still couldn't pull it off.