Stadia's game prices are very high according to Eurogamer

[Jaxyfoo]

I thought Stadia would be along the lines of the Nvidia shield. There you buy PC games, or stream the games you already own from your own PC or from the Nvidia servers. There are a chunk of games included free. In fact more than Stadia has in total.

It works nicely enough. You might have to queue to get going at peak times. But it has a large library. You also have several options, so yes you can take advantage of Steam sales. It cost the ballpark same. Playing online games, there is often much less lag than playing in pc.

There are shortfalls though on the shield. It's really awkward to run voice comms with friends. I usually have to run discord on my tablet or phone, so no headset. I have a feeling lots are using it for a cheap fortnite player so the queues have popped up lately. Some companies don't support it at all, including some big ones like EA.

So after getting good moneys worth from the Shield, I was hoping Stadia would be along the same lines, but fix lots of these problems. Good voice comms, easy partying. More game support for more Pc games. Maybe mod support too. No queues. Better overall support in general. I can't really fault the streaming, I was actually shocked how well it worked. So I knew that could work and would in the future.

So I was disappointed to say the least to see it is a limited closed shop system. It has a game price more expensive than the home consoles. At least on the consoles you see silly sales where you can get 3 of those games for the price of 1. They never go down either if google movies and music is an indicator. No support from the gaming world in general, and no target audience. I have no clue why they didn't either copy Nvidia shield or copy Gamepass/PS Now and make a Netflix style inclusive library of a choice of games.

So I expect Stadia to fail, because it's entire model screams of corporate idiocy. However streaming games does work, so I do expect it to one day be the norm. Just run much better by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. Maybe Geforce now will grow to cover the Pc market the same way, with Epic and Steam offering their own services in the future. Maybe Stadia will offer some of the bigger companies a streaming platform. We will see I guess. In this model I just can't see it lasting 2 years. It's crazy to see one of biggest tech giants in the world in Google getting so much wrong. They have obviously sat down with a grand plan of monetizing gaming in their favour, when they should instead of built up a world class service which could have established a loyal base, because it a great place to game.