We see this again and again. The cynic in me sees Stadia as yet another internal promotion scheme, masquerading as a product.
I doubt this will ever change. The internal momentum of the company culture will make it so. What does it mean for investors? Google has enough money they can just buy their way into markets indefinitely. It will probably keep them going, but I don't expect huge growth. I'd probably be putting my money into other stocks if I had to choose. I honestly don't think people would miss Google much if it was gone.
"We have some of the best cloud engineers in the world, we have one of the biggest fleets of data centers. Not a lot of companies could reasonably implement cloud gaming, but I bet we could!"
That part is true! But then:
"Productization? Pricing? Market-fit? Customer service and messaging? Whatever, we've got good tech, it'll sell itself. We can figure all that other stuff out later, that's the easy part."
...cue the flop. It was always going to be this way.
I’m quickly approaching 40, and I would like nothing more to not have to own the windows desktop that I only use for one thing. To play blood bowl 2 (and eventually 3) a few times a week. If I could do that from a browser on my MacBook, you can bet I’d never own another desktop in this life.
That’s anecdotal or course, but there’s quite a lot of us.
1) PC gamers tend to revel in owning (building, customizing, optimizing) their hardware; not just because it lets them play the games they want to play, but even for its own sake. RGB arrays, overclocking, custom case builds. Streaming can't compete with that.
2) "Casual" gamers already have powerful devices in their pockets with thousands and thousands of games available, including many free ones and many high-quality ones.
3) Console gamers are presumably the target (?) market. But an Xbox Series S costs $299. The (absolute minimum) Stadia starter kit costs $99; you're already a third of the way there. And then there's the subscription fee. And then you still have to buy the games. Something I don't think Google realized is that over a console generation, the dominant cost quickly becomes the games themselves, not the hardware. If Stadia users still have to buy them at full-price - $60 a pop - that $200 you saved at the beginning quickly becomes a diminishing fraction. You just aren't saving that much, and in exchange, you get the constant risk that your whole library will simply be killed at any moment, as well as...
4) The latency. The problem with latency is it's not a fully solvable issue, no matter how much hardware or money you throw at the problem. There's a physical lower bound on how long it takes electricity to get from your house to a data center and back. And then there's all the routing infrastructure run by your ISP, which a) is outside of Google or Microsoft or whoever's ability to improve, and b) is unlikely to be improved by the ISP because game streaming is basically the only usecase where bleeding-edge latency actually matters. And in terms of how much it matters: one frame at 60FPS translates to 16.7ms. Client-rendered multiplayer games don't have as much of an issue with higher latencies because of client-side prediction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side_prediction
Here's the only way I could see game streaming being successful:
An all-you-can-eat, Netflix-style buffet of big-budget games. Like Apple Arcade, except it has games like Call of Duty and Borderlands that you could normally only play on a console or a gaming PC. You pay a monthly fee, and you never have to buy or even download a game. Dedicated thin-client hardware is a waste; anybody who wants to buy hardware will just buy a console. Your target customers don't want that. Instead this would only be playable on existing platforms, primarily desktop/web/mobile, though possibly existing consoles as well.
That would be a decent value-proposition for some people. Those playing really fast-paced games and/or sticklers for latency wouldn't go for it, some existing phone-gamers might, but mostly you would get people like your friend from college who just wants to play Borderlands with you but isn't really a "gamer" outside of that.
Microsoft is the most clearly-positioned company to succeed at this, as far as I can tell. They have two decades of experience in the industry, they have cloud chops and datacenters, and they carry clout with publishers and even have in-house studios (because a subscription-only game buffet it going to be a tough sell when it comes to license-holders).
And of course they've already started: Xbox Game Pass is a smallish version of the all-you-can-eat subscription, and they've been experimenting with cloud-hosted releases. You can even play Control on your Nintendo Switch via Microsoft's cloud. That's pretty cool.
But I don't think this will ever make gaming PCs or even consoles obsolete, mainly because of the unsolvability of the latency issue. It will be good enough for some people.
Oh and Stadia will die anyway, because Google doesn't understand any of the above
1. You claim PC gamers do it for the hardware as much as the software. Let's assume the data backs that - it certainly seems like it's likely to be true. And I'm biased in wanting to believe it too, because I like to build and revel in the machines that run the games I own. What isn't true is that those same people, people like me, cannot also be attracted to things like Stadia.
2. Services like Stadia do not replace the many games that people play on the many devices that already exist. It's not a "one or the other" thing. They allow those devices to play more games.
The biggest flaw is in suggesting that casual gamers (a term which is flawed for many other reasons) wouldn't be a potential market for a thing like Stadi. Mobile game sales account for almost half of ALL game related sales. 48%, in fact. $76 billion in sales. A thing like Stadia means that people can play more games on their devices.
And let me say, games on Stadia play incredibly well on my iPad that's a few generations old. That's very attractive. Being able to play PC quality games on my iPad when I travel is worth every penny. I'd even argue it's easier to play games on Stadia than it is to play natively installed games. With Stadia, there's no downloading of the game, no installing, not time wasted waiting for updates. You just turn it on, and it works.
First, where you say "casual gamers", I think what you're trying to say is "people who play games on their mobile devices." You go on to describe the abilities that mobile devices have. While I won't dispute that, one thing I think you're missing is that services like Stadia make it even easier to play games on those devices that don't exist for those devices, or will at some future date, optimized to run on those mobile devices.
I'll probably beat this horse to death, but to compare: I was playing Cyberpunk 2077 on my iPad through Stadia minutes after it was available. It took nearly a day before I could run it on my PC, and after the first several patches I just stopped bothering. Granted, the game is a beautiful mess, but the point is: it was effortless on the iPad, and has been ever since. Not only that, but I can switch to my iPhone, or to my PC and pick up right where I left off. If I do it quick enough, the game just unpaused when I jump to the new device. And I can travel and still play. There's no way my PC, with its UV reactive liquid cooling is going to travel with me.
3. Stadia starter kit is optional. Stadia is free. Do you have a controller? Keyboard and mouse? A web browser? You're good. There is no required subscription fee. You buy the games, and they cost the same as console games. So yeah, if you have a device that can run modern browsers, you don't need to buy a console.
4. I assume when you mention latency, you mean "input latency" - meaning, the time it takes for the game to react to your button press or mouse movement. There are indeed hard limits to how low input latency can be. The game cannot update its entire model and render it in 0ms. It has to make calculations based on your inputs, then show you what changed. But that's not the only constraint. Consider the entire picture: a target on the screen moves, and you need to shoot it. If you're good, it'll take you about 100ms to react. Most people can't react in less than 150ms. It takes 5-10ms to transmit your reaction over USB. It takes the simulation any number of milliseconds to process and tell the monitor to redraw itself. Let's assume the processing time of the game engine is 0ms. The best monitors will add 2ms to the clock.
So, from your human reaction to the resulting frame, at best, it takes from 107ms to react to something on screen and see the results of your reaction.
And that's on your PC. No networking.
What does Stadia add? On a good connection, it'll add 20-30ms. To be fair, that's what I've seen on my pretty normal cable company internet connection over 5ghz Wifi. With most games, you'd never notice the extra time. Are you going to notice it as a pro gamer playing FPS competitively? Probably.
Your assertion that Stadia will die is about the most right thing you've said. Even with a market, Google tends to kill things seemingly at random. What will help it die quicker is if Nvidia's service is able to outperform Stadia in terms of simplicity and streaming speeds.
But saying streaming based gaming won't find a market reminds me a lot of what the cable companies and Blockbuster used to say about Netflix.
I can’t ping my router and get consistent latency that low.
Latency on speed tests varies between 15 (off peak no load) and 100ms (normal).
There is no way that by the time that all adds up, stadia is going to be a better experience than local.
My internet is also shared with other people, in a country with notoriously subpar internet (yay Australia), the closer we get to reality, the less appealing stadia becomes. The kind of game streaming I could get behind is the rainway/local streaming approach where I run the game on local hardware (pc/PS5) and stream to convenient device.