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Comment by throwawaysleep | Hacker News Reader

Do the kinds of people shelling out $60 for a game find the $500 console a big barrier?

I think so: People who played video games as kids, don't really have much time for them now, and don't really want to go through the effort of even figuring out which console to get and setting it up, but occasionally get curious about a particular game. Maybe they don't even have an obvious place in the house for a console, if they only have wall-mounted smart TVs with nothing hooked up to them, or maybe they don't want to give their own young kids console games yet, which is hard to do with a PlayStation in the living room.

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?

> go through the effort of even figuring out which console to get and setting it up

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.

Not only are there only three consoles, I bet I could set up any of the three faster than setting up stadia.

Modern consoles take way longer to setup than they used to. Playing a game on PS5 requires installing it, plus usually patches. I think you're giving consoles too much credit for ease of use.

> Playing a game on PS5 requires installing it, plus usually patches.

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.

Yeah, "once", as in the first time, as in the "setup" process.

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.

Yeah, and it seems stadia was more difficult to setup than a console.

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