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Comment by tzakrajs | Hacker News Reader

Stadia has overcome the speed of light, so yes it's a viable product now and needs a response.

There might be cases where Stadia will be too high-latency for some games/gamers, but I would wager it will make huge inroads in the untapped market of people who want to play games but can't or won't invest in gaming hardware.

Let’s revisit this in a year.

Sure thing

yes, instead they buy phones for 1k.

And now they will be able to play AAA games on those phones.

just saying that for 1k you get a decent PC too.

besides it's not the "real" experience.

Most people will buy a 1K phone they can take with them than a 1K PC they can't.

Exactly and to address the other child comment, those $1k phones have hardware to render AAA games now. Google doesn’t realize they don’t actually have a sustainable audience. It’s sad.

I predict the audience will be huge. The audience for watching Let's Play's on Twitch and Youtube is enormous. I would be surprised if a significant portion of that audience doesn't convert when the barrier to entry is clicking a "play" button on Youtube.

It's not just the people with $1k phones: it's all the students who's parents got them a MacBook Air for college, and all the kids and teenagers who's parents won't buy them a console for Christmas. Not to mention markets where gaming hardware is several times more expensive than in the US or Europe.

edit: if the experience is decent

I think it isn't the technical part of Stadia that will determine its success, but its business model. Without the pricing information, not much can be said about it. I'm a little surprised that Google hasn't been more up-front about how much it's going to cost.

PS Now accounts for about half of all game subscription service revenue, so half of 273 million (quarterly).

Doing the math, that leaves you with somewhere in the realm of 2.38 million active subscribers (273 million *.52 / $60).

The PS4 installed base is about 86 million consoles. That means only about 2 or 3 percent are active PS Now subscribers.

Source: https://www.gamespot.com/forums/system-wars-314159282/ps-now...

If Stadia comes out with a massive Steam or PS Store type of catalog where you can access any game, I think it'll be a runaway success.

If it's just PS Now (along with a similarly small catalog) without the need to spend as much on hardware, I don't see it being anything more than a ~2-5 million user subscription service.

It's a nice pile of revenue, but it's not "overtake the rest of the market as the preferred way to play games" type of numbers.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's not a subscription model, and they monitize like any cloud service. As a user you just pay for the games, and the publisher has to figure out how to pay for the bandwidth.

I think I'm starting to see why Google hasn't said anything about pricing:

> The tech giant believes that game developers will no longer be limited to computing and will be able to create games with "nearly unlimited resources". [1]

So the paradigm shift is that as a developer, your game simply consumes the amount of cloud resources that it requires to run, and nothing more. i.e. Stardew Valley is cheaper to run ("publish") than Red Dead Redemption.

So perhaps the idea is that the game publisher has to pay for the compute time and price the game accordingly.

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