FWIW, Stadia the console is an amazing product. It rendered useless buying a console in theory.
If any Stadia team member is reading: I want to work with you in this amazing project.
Unfortunately you need to have games on a console if you don’t want to make games (making them even at loss benefitted stadia image nonetheless) you need to license them and this is the turning point: you need a stronger acquisition strategy.
Buy the game outright if you want, but pay, shall we say, .40 per hour of playtime with a minimum of 5 hours.
Are publishers not interested in terms like these? Google's clearly interested in the "start playing from Youtube with your favorite streamer" angle. A per-hour pricing model would click so well with that. Maybe streamers even get a cut from the first-time player fees.
A cloud server capable of gaming costs about $1 an hour. It has to be an on demand price, not a spot price because people won't accept their game being turned off arbitrary.
Don't get started with "it doesn't really cost Google $1 an hour to host a $1 hour server" because Google is forgoing $1 they could have gotten from selling it to a real customer.
Also cloud providers charge $0.10 a GB for bandwidth, and if the game sucks down 5 GB of bandwidth an hour we are talking $1.50 an hour.
If you play a game for 50 hours then you are talking $75 in recurring costs and that's before you pay for the actual game.
The "all-you-can-eat" plan is something that cloud gaming companies are offering now because it is familiar to people (e.g. the bloated cable bundle and Netflix following in its footsteps) and people just think it is natural and don't think "hmmm... is this a real business?" the way they would if you started writing down what things cost.
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What we know is that software devs use Javascript on the front end because they don't care how efficient it is (you are paying for it) but they use Rust and Go on the back end because they don't want to pay a dime more than they have to when they're paying.)
Thus with cloud gaming the cloud gaming company will always have a reason to Scroogle you with the hardware.
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If cloud gaming is really a scam to drive up the stock prices of companies like Google, or if it is an attempt to intimidate serious companies like Sony and Valve out of the business, the story that Google is telling makes sense.
If they think that somebody somewhere somehow plans to make money off cloud gaming that's another thing all together.
And that’s from someone who has never really considered getting it before; I don’t even own a console and do all my gaming on PC and phone.
Im hoping they consider more and broader partnerships that like going forward.
its a much smaller complaint but the controller choice was strange too, flipped the analog and digital controls - or at least feels like it compared to switch pro controller or xbox. Guess its more like the playstation setup that i never liked
But I think the problem results from the above. The barrier to entry is so low that entrants don't make many fun games (there's just more of them), and the available technologies to saturate usage of are so expensive to fully utilize and staff for that making a fun game falls by the wayside (too few games produced by those that can make great games, and of those, most of them are not even good).
