Stadia - Google's vision for the future of gaming

How on Earth did this launch with an app that only works on Google Pixel phones. Isn’t it being mobile half the selling point? You need to be on everyone’s phone!

No, they’re the equivalent of the previous generation, the Vega 64, which basically performed like a GTX1080.

Is Eurogamer mistaken about this? I thought at launch they weren’t going to connect directly to the cloud but had to be bluetoothed or wired in?

It’s direct with a Chromecast, otherwise wired.

Another article at Eurogamer that just talks about Stadia from its business model standpoint. This things seriously flawed even without talking about potential tech issues.

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

Yes, they aren’t trying very hard yet. I think Google views this as another beta, but they’re charging full-price.

I won’t be bound by my NDA come midnight so happy to share my experience with Stadia so far if anyone has specific qs tomorrow.

It’s Tuesday, 12:46am GMT. Just sayin.

You’re under an NDA even though media reviews are dropping?

What a strange article. The entirety of the author’s argument appears to be:

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 …

But that’s just a totally unsupported assertion. What they don’t even attempt to explain is why a subscription model to a collection of random games is the only valid business model.

PS Now and Game Pass depend largely on a) a huge back catalog of games that no longer have much commercial value by themselves, to bulk up the number of available games; b) people owning the hardware to run the games locally rather than stream them; c) the games getting most of their revenue from actual sales, not subscriptions.

Stadia doesn’t and can’t have either of the two first. It wouldn’t ever get the third if they launched with all games being part of a mandatory subscription right from the start. I don’t see how you make a subscription service work under those conditions. While the model of no subscription, very little up-front hardware spending, and games sold at retail prices should be pretty compelling to the segment of players who only buy a couple of specific games each year. It’s quite hard to amortize the cost of console hardware.

There’s a genuine competitive advantage there, in a way that Stadia Pro will never have, no matter how large a portion of the library they bundle into the subscription. But for some reason the author here is advocating doubling down on the garbage Pro strategy rather than playing to the strengths of the platform.

(It’ll be interesting to see how the Game Pass + XCloud offering actually ends up working. I just can’t believe that they’ll bundle streaming support into the $10/month tier. Sony can do it since PS Now has such an… umm… vintage game library, so their content costs should be low. By contrast, MS is very aggressive about having high profile games launch directly on the Game Pass.)

One other thing with Stadia, is that normal that people use up their Internet connection for pirating or watching legit streaming video or even gaming, especially in a shared household.

Who has their full pipe available all the time for optimum image quality and latency?

And how would Google make a 0€ subscription work under a low customer spending model to amortize the cost of the hardware that makes it all work? No one talks about it because it’s a huge loss.

I mean, they plan to make this model work for 1080p, supposedly at some point next year…

With full price games and a $10 monthly subscription (not to mention the “Founders” who ultimately paid about 65% of the price of a new Xbox One S in hardware anyway), I’m utterly baffled at what mainstream audience Stadia is supposed to be for.

If they were going to launch this service at all, they should’ve held it back to next holiday: i) make sure the entire feature suite is done and functional for the best possible first impression, ii) line-up some upcoming NEXT GEN games for launch, instead of a tepid collection of games that came out months ago, iii) offer people staring down a new console purchase, a cheap alternative that still looks great, and iv) have the free option ready-to-go at launch.

Instead, you’re offering pre-existing games, at a bad price, on an unfinished service, for $10 a month on top of that, at a point in the current console generation where you can buy the standard consoles for $200, or even less depending on how hard you look, and new consoles are still a year off.

AND you’ve got Microsoft getting ready to couple Game Pass to xCloud, which is going to give their option a massive library of Netflix-style games, along with all of Microsoft’s own games from their 15+ first- and second-party studios.

Google have bungled this entire thing. Majorly.

You have to remember that the base service is actually free and the monthly fee is only for 4k streaming. In theory the only hard price is the cost of the games.

It’s just that the base version won’t release until sometime next year - the version being sold now is basically the premium tier for early adaptors who don’t mind being on a paid beta.

This is a real CNN story.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/15/tech/google-stadia-women-gamers/index.html

Traditionally, gamer gear has been manly. Microsoft (MSFT)'s Xbox controller comes in colors like electric blue or firetruck red. Sony’s controllers are available in black as well as various shades of neon and camo. And Nvidia’s angular, black controller looks a little too much like Darth Vader’s mask.

Stadia is taking a more gender-neutral approach. Google is selling controllers that come in white, black or Wasabi green. (Nintendo, which made the Switch Light in bright colors like turquoise and yellow, is another outlier in designing for a gaming audience that includes women as well as men.)

“Some of our historical competitors in the console space have been a bit more masculine and a bit more mechanical in their approach,” Phil Harrison, Google VP and head of Stadia, said in an interview with CNN Business.

“If Google has an advantage here versus Xbox or Playstation, it’s that it doesn’t have a pre-existing ‘gamer culture’ it has to appease,” said Laine Nooney, assistant professor and historian of video games at New York University.

Except they didn’t sell it as “pay us to be in a limited beta”. They are already charging for the subscription and the games - Founders just get three months of it free. This is the launch. You don’t get to sell the subscription AND the games AND the hardware, and then claim it’s just a beta. Publications wouldn’t be reviewing Stadia, if this was perceived as anything other than a launch. Google wouldn’t be sending out pre-launch review hardware to outlets, if this wasn’t a launch.

The version being sold now, is what the media is talking about. This version is what is being reviewed far and wide as “Google Stadia”. If the free tier is the real Stadia, then that’s all the more reason this launch has been completely bungled, and they should have held the entire thing back until that free tier was ready.

Project xCloud is a real beta - you sign up to get on a waiting list, and everything is free to test out once you’re in.

Someone at CNN was handed the gaming beat for the day, came up with a narrative, and did 5 minutes of research via Amazon to try and confirm it.

Wow, black and white controllers - how did Stadia manage to beat Sony and Microsoft to the punch on these two colours after all these years? And why is “Wasabi green” more “gender neutral” than… neon…?

Meanwhile, Phil Harrison rolls with it, and talks absolute nonsense.

EDIT: $150 for an Xbox One S All-Digital Edition during Black Friday week:

Comes with Minecraft, Fortnite, and Sea of Thieves. $20 more than the “Founder’s Edition”.

And for the same $10 a month(not including all the great deals) a consumer can get Gamepass which gives Xbox Gold plus access to 200+ games.

Their business model has no value or logic frankly over what’s out there to get people to choose them over their competitors.

I agree with everyone that says that the launch & positioning is a mess, but people misrepresenting what is in which price tier and trying to comparing that against special time limited deals for Xbox or PS4 isn’t really helping.

Stadia is basically made up of 3 parts + 1 optional piece of hardware:

Stadia Base Service : Free- Streaming at up to 1080p. Online play included.
(optional) Stadia Pro Subscription : $10/month : Allows for streaming up to 4k + gives 1-2 games free a month & special game discounts on the game store
(optional) Stadia Controller : $70 - Has special wireless setup that allows for less lag than standard controller
(optional) Chromecast Ultra : $70 - Allows TVs to stream at up to 4k if your TV doesn’t natively support it. Currently only want to play 4k streaming on a TV.

The current bundle basically forces you to buy all of it + gives you 3 months free of the subscription tier. You don’t need to keep paying the subscription fee if you don’t want afterwards - you’ll just lose access to pro specific services but nothing else.

Anyway, I personally think bundling the Chromecast Ultra into the launch bundle was a mistake but I guess Google wants to ramp the service up slowly? They’ll probably do another major push next E3 for when they’ll launch the free service.