I'm sorry but a lot of you guys are showing your age & or stubborness. Such a visceral response based on your preference alone...

"The trade association estimates consumers spent $15.9 billion on subscription streaming, which now accounts for 63% of the entire home entertainment market."

People like the convenience of their entertainment not being attached to specific devices. They jump between mobile, desktop/laptop, TV. They go to a friends house and simply log in... they like not having to wait for downloads or hoarding 100s of GBs of entertainment around. They also like having a wide sample of experiences (see Xbox Game Pass/Spotify). When all of this comes at a cost effective price it's a no brainer.

...

With your second point, you're again referring to current tech hurdles which are overcome in time, it's a very mute point. No one is saying cloud gaming is going to dominate in 2021 or even at any point in the next decade, but it will grow. There are trade offs in quality of image, latency, but depending on your connection it's definitely a respectable experience with AAA games at the moment. So I don't see your comment about being reserved for BC/Mobile

What's clear is that cloud gaming is still in its awkward infancy, its potential market based off infrastructure is still small and the pricing models are far from being consumer friendly unlike Netflix etc. Although Microsofts announcement that xcloud will come bundled with  Gamepass is a step in the right direction and should be an interesting thing to follow.

P.S: Its actually much easier to make a playlist on spotify with instant access to almost all music releases, and you can share it with friends. Maybe not so convenient for your car journey if you lack bluetooth or the relevant ports. I'm on the premium services which also allows you to download all of your music for offline use too. 

Funny because on the case of movies the first service really was netflix and it only became more expensive not less, but already started at a reasonable price with the very obvious you pay to watch content but don't buy content, similar to what PSNow is and XCloud will be, Stadia is nothing alike.

Yeah, I would love to see the breakdown of activity on the userbase. My assumption would be almost no one is buying content on Stadia as it makes no practical sense, they're just playing the games which come with the subscription

There may be some that buy, there is always people that logic works different than ours.

I wouldn't say it taken decades. Some companies tried to push VR back in the late-80s-early-90s but everyone immediately stopped after they all came to conclusion that it simply doesn't work. There was a pause between Oculus started working on what future VR headsets are. So, we can say it took just a couple of years to build the current VR market from the ground up. As for movies, streaming is not the standard still. You have to go to cinema to watch all the premieres. If streaming would have been the default for movies, all movies would have released on Netflix day one. But they are not. When it comes to music, you pay a monthly license fee actually. That's why it is so popular. You can do whatever you want with the huge catalog of music available on the service as long as you pay for subscription. You can take it offline or stream. See the huge difference with Stadia here? And it is not to mention something that has been brought up already is that games have much higher bandwidth requirements because when it comes to games, any couple miliseconds lag is unacceptable.

Some people don't realize how serious even a few milliseconds of lag can be

https://www.skytopia.com/stuff/lag.html

If still having trouble understanding then here. This simulates playing an FPS with lag.

https://phil-sa.itch.io/input-lag-simulator

Stadia has known to have some lag issues even on good bandwidth. A lot of people in the US don't have the best internet connection plus ISP data caps and rising prices. Streaming can never be as good as local hardware.

Stadia will "guess" your input before hand to reduce lag... haven't you seem people saying it will almost autoplay?

The first bolded part represents decades. People stepping away from it to allow technology to advance still counts. People didn't just follow Oculus as a trend, R&D teams were testing and waiting for the right time to exploit the potential for a long time. At the very least it will be another decade at before VR really matures into a more mass market product (this doesn't equate to it competing with traditional television play in regards to games)

Regarding the later bold, people are still misreading my point. I haven't said Stadia will be successful, I said streaming is the future (and a huge financial investment) so Google will of course fight to make stadia happen as oppose dropping it after a year like some other experiments they've tackled which are typically low investment, have low potential return or are completely dominated by far more successful competitors.

Subscription models etc can change at a flip of a switch, just look at Xcloud/Gamepass. Meanwhile lag is not some monstrous obstacle that will take a century to overcome, so I'm not sure why its such a point of contention here. Sensitivity to lag also varies by person & game. I'm developing a game on UE4 and was constantly getting warnings of the lag from the Dual Shock 4 being over 10miliseconds, I didn't realise until I was relying on gyro aiming where it really created jittering camera movement, but with stick movement it didn't bother me in that testing evironment. I also have a friend using Stadia (at least he was back in Feb), he was playing Destiny 2 and had no complaints or at least was happy enough not to complain. Maybe he was lucky with his connection, maybe being a casual gamer meant he wasn't so sensitive to lag, but its clear we're talking about a technology which is proven to work Today. That doesn't mean it works all of the time or for most people but its enough to squash any doubt about its potential in future. Future doesn't mean tomorrow, it means 10-20 years. Just look at the 15 years it took for digital downloads to be incorporated in consoles, to where we're at today 

Bear in mind, nothing we're discussing is unknown to the Billion dollar companies investing heavily in the field with far more access to user experiences, testing, understanding of infrastructure & technolohy. They are all anticipating the same future. We can see with the music industry different forms of consumption can coexist. I personally have no interest in cloud gaming in its current form, but I'm sure I'll change tune as it matures offers more clear benefits and fewer compromises.

Just sen people pressing a button and sometimes taking nearly a full second to register on the screen. The worst one I saw was from Google themselves on stage in 2019. Ass Creed. He pressed a button and nothing happened for about 1 second and they quickly abandoned that to move on the next demo.