Why I think Stadia is not a good thing for gamers or users
306Google has just made its move towards the gaming market. It's called Stadia, and I think it's a bad move. Let's see what we know so far, and why I think it won't be a good option for consumers.
Stadia is Google's terrible name for its "Project stream". The name is not that important though, what matters is that Stadia will allow you to play games from Chrome, without installation, download times, from any device, handheld or otherwise. Stadia will run on Linux, and will run games through Vulkan. Google says that the power behind a game running on its service will be higher than a PS4 pro and an Xbox One combined.
It will launch in 2019, in the US, some parts of Europe, and Canada, and will probably be a netflix-style subscription system, but it also could be ad-based, even though I doubt that the margins would be high enough from ads to enable letting everyone play for free. You won't need any hardware other than what you already have, and can pick up a controller if you need one, or use any bluetooth controller. iOS devices availability has not been confirmed, though.
There are some positives here ! First, this means that you won't need a dedicated gaming PC to play. Stadia would allow you to use any crummy laptop able to run chrome, and game on that at high resolution and framerates.
Except that's only true for games available on Stadia, and we have no idea what these are as of now. I would imagine Google will try to strike deals with major publishers soon, but there are 2 problems:
- Stadia runs on Linux, most big name games don't. While I love gaming on linux, most of it is done on proton and steamplay for now. Publishers would need to port their games to Linux and Vulkan.
- Big publishers are starting to build their own platforms to sell their own games. The Epic games store is already getting exclusive deals, Bethesda has its store and launcher, there's Steam, the Battle.net launcher, Origin, Uplay...
Second main point is that you can play your games from anywhere, start on a TV, pick up on a phone somewhere else... Gaming on a 4G connection might even be a thing, or with 5G networks if they prove sufficient. This is an exciting prospect, and you could imagine that gaming on a phone would require a lower resolution, since the screen size is smaller, so worse connections might suffice.
Well the obvious one is that it's a subscription service. You don't own anything here, much like Netflix or spotify. If Google decides that the games from publisher X don't make enough money, then you can say goodbye to them.
That Subscription model also have a significant drawback: it will take time to convince publishers to jump on board, and since it uses Linux, it will probably never have near 100% of the gaming catalog one would like to access. Just like Xbox Game Pass, or PS Now, the service probably will give you a limited selection of games to choose from. On an Xbox or PS4, it's not a big deal: any game that's not in the service, you can buy physically, or digitally. On a device where Stadia is your only way of playing games, if the game is not on Stadia, you can't play it.
If you buy a gaming PC to go around this limitation, you might as well buy games from other providers and not bother with a subscription.
You might have deduced from that video that I don't like what we know about Stadia, and you'd be right. I think having to deal with yet another provider for games is a bad thing for consumers.
Generally, more competition means more choice and a better experience for consumers, but not where exclusivity deals are involved. While we don't know if Google will strike some of these, they already announced that they are working on their own game studio, so that probably means the games released by this team will be exclusive to Stadia.
Some might argue that it will bring more games to the Linux desktop, in native form. While it might give more exposure to Vulkan and Linux, it most definitely doesn't mean any game ported to Stadia will also see a release on Linux. Maintenance and support costs still apply, whether the port is ready or not, and these might still prevent games from being released for Linux.
To be honest, I don't think this service will be a success. I think Google won't be able to bring enough games to Stadia to make it a compelling choice, I think publishers will be wary of entering a "spotify" situation where their considerable margins erode, and I think consumers won't pick up a subscription service without games.
Latency and internet connexion availability might also be an issue which we won't be able to confirm until the service is actually available. And that's the thing to keep from all of this:
Stadia is not available yet. What we know about it as of now doesn't fill me with confidence, but I won't make up my mind until it's actually released and the games start coming.
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