I only used the Shadow gaming VM service so far and the servers are in a neighbouring country, with 100 Mbit/s bandwidth and 30ms ping to 1.1.1.1, so not optimal conditions, but GTA IV, Minecraft and other games were not fun to play due to the input lag.
http://www.gcping.com/ to the closest Google data center puts me at 12ms median.
edit: gcping.com puts me at 40ms
So yes, if the game(s) you want to play one of the included games and the service goes bust you don’t lose much. If you purchased a title and service goes bust then you likely lost that money.
Except I had to pay for the console $400, pay for PS Plus to play online $60/yr, and pay for games that I want to play $60/game.
But with PS4 I'm locked in to playing on my 1 TV at home or a small catalog of games I have very little interest in with PS Now.
With Stadia, if I can play the latest AAA games anywhere for $10/mo and the experience is rock solid 99% of the time, I'll be all over this.
The basic version is also free, which is something Sony isn't going to be able to offer me. But with Stadia I can play on my TV, on my desktop, on the go, etc.
I buy most of my games digitally whether or PSN or Steam. If either of those go out of business, I'm pretty much SOL. I don't see Google allowing you to claim your license for local copies as the Stadia hardware is specialized and custom, not something you can emulate easily outside of it's infrastructure, but that's a risk I'm willing to take.
I'm tired of updating my GPU drivers and experinece (5-10 minutes), then launching Steam, waiting for it to update and restart (2-3 minutes), then picking the game I want to play, waiting for it to update and install (5-10 minutes), then finally launch the game and have it spend more time connecting to servers before I can game.
The value prop of seeing a game trailer or game video that seems interesting and being able to say "play with stadia" and it just throwing me right into the game is the feature that speaks most to me.
If Stadia does this and it works well enough, i'll gladly get rid of gaming PC.
I never understood this complaint. You can be perfectly fine running GPU drivers from a year ago. You don't need to update them every day.
With Steam, it "updating" every time you run it seems to be a lie really, but I think most people who run Steam just leave it always on.
The games, I have 400 on Steam. Maybe 1-3 update per day on average, and there's lot's of overlap ie 90% of my library hasn't updated in a year, and 9% of the leftover updates maybe once a month.