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> Why would anyone buy a game for a specific cloud service?

Isn't that what people do when they buy games on Steam?

Not really, you're buying access to a game which you can download an unlimited amount of times and play on your own hardware, often even offline. They're not entirely dissimilar, but they're definitely different models.

Also steam is absolutely central to revenue at Valve whereas there was no world in which Stadia revenue would ever be any more than a rounding error at Google. In the bacon and eggs analogy, google is the chicken here and Valve is the pig. Fully committed.

Steam feels more permanent since the client and game downloads would be preserved, and any phoning home modded or simulated in the event Valve shut it down.

Theoretically, the Stadia system and the game content could be open sourced, but that isn’t something Google is likely to do, and since the games are entirely streamed, there aren’t any local copies floating around.

It would be great if Stadia developers got together and made a new self-hostable streaming application that could play their ports, or at least used the ports to help the community figure out a server that streamed the games close to spec.

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