I think the idea is that while you still pay $60 for the game, you don’t pay $400 for the console.
I'm surprised at how many people are discounting what Stadia offered. My reasons for not investing in it are pretty much just data caps and lack of trust in Google.
Also, I've owned every Playstation since PS2, and I've never played an online multiplayer game on one (with the exception of Journey, which does so silently), nor do I give the slightest damn about achievements.
If I could just play the game and not worry about the hardware, I’d be tempted as long as the service was reliable. Had Stadia become a real business, I’d have jumped on in 5 years or something.
They probably spent millions on getting the whole Ubisoft and EA catalogues on Stadia. There was also Red Dead Redemption 2 quite early on, Football Manager 2020, Destiny 2, some Doom, Hitman, Cyberpunk. Not to mention hundreds of indie games. Saying Google didn't invest enough is showing lack of knowledge about the platform.
Thet didn't need an exclusive, that money would have been better spent on convincing more studios to port, marketing. And reassuring potential users with a promise for a refund.
But you own the console for life, whereas a game on Stadia is known to disappear at any moment (because we know google will drop it).
I still didn't see any value in Stadia though. The cloud-only full-price approach was the main issue (GeForce Now had them beat there), but also their investment in hardware has been pitiful, so you're effectively playing at low graphics settings. Rather than addressing that, they chased the 4K buzzword. The kind of gamers who insist on 4K aren't the kind who want to use cloud gaming services. GeForce Now understood this, Stadia didn't.
Incidentally Google were sued for supposedly misleading promotion of their 4K support: https://www.pcgamer.com/stadias-4k-gaming-claims-come-back-t...
First they had an almost year-long waiting list. Now you have to pay a hefty commissioning fee.
For me that makes no sense as a cloud setup. The benefit of cloud is paying when you need it (like when I travel and didn't bring my PC) and not when I don't need it.
Stadia did offer that but because you had to pay for the games it also wasn't worthwhile.
I use plutosphere now for VR when I'm traveling and that's great and not too expensive. Still a bit buggy and slow to boot the machines though.
And, there hasn’t been a waitlist for some time now. At least in California. I was up and running within 30 minutes of starting my subscription, and can cancel any time.
And, regardless of the exact implementation, the Shadow approach is infinitely more desirable to me than the complete lock in, and limited selection, of Stadia.
And yes I know you use your own games.. But it's not suited for casual use for me. I use plutosphere instead. That's only intended for VR but that's all I use anyway :) Plutosphere is also a "PC in the cloud" but you pay $2 per hour and a $10 monthly fee if you want persistent storage. No sign-up fees though. But its pricing is pretty ideal for holidays, whereas Shadow PC is now completely unviable for that with the activation fee.
With the associated UX of manually logging in, handling disk space, waiting for installations and updates, etc. etc. etc.
> manually logging in
You should try shadow. You just open the Shadow app in whatever device, it boots, and you’re in. No login.
You do have to boot with a different device, first for VR with their Quest app (implementation detail of the Beta) or Virtual Desktop (required).
You have to login to each and every store (Steam, Epic, Ubi, etc.) you want to play games with.
> there’s no censorship or artificial restrictions in the game stores
As of now. Some games' ToS already state you can't play them remotely, and technically Shadow would be in violation of that. It's enough for EA or whatever to threaten to sue them and they might implement restrictions.
I agree that the flexibility and continued ownership of the games is a massive bonus.
Once, as you also need to do when booting up your a console for the first time.
It's probably possible to turn some of these people into regular gamers with a service like Stadia. But a lot of them won't buy many games, and those that do might bite the bullet and go out and buy a console, so probably not the best audience for a product?
There are effectively 3 consoles and it takes about a minute to set it up.
They don't strike me as common reasons to choose Stadia.
Which happens once and requires no intervention from the user.
The rest of the time it's as simple as take DVD out of box and put in drive.
If you meant "setup" as in literally just playing a game you've already setup, then sure, that can be fairly quick, but still not as quick as Stadia was.