Fascinating edit history on the wiki page.
First draft dated 1st Jan 2019 under the name “Project Stream”. Renamed earlier today to Stadia.
I didn’t mean it as a cynical post. I just think it would be a natural thing to do for any company.
I’m naturally cynical so I’m with you, but it seems edits were independent in this case.
It’s awful for people like us, people who want to own games and play them past the console’s lifespan. It’s all streamed, you won’t “own” anything.
It won’t go away, google has too much money to operate this at a loss until they get their studio off the ground.
I think it will depend on how much this box costs. Also, considering you’re going to need a fast connection, with unlimited bandwidth, you’re basically cutting out all the rural areas in the country, and everyone on comcast.
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it being a streaming service means there is no dedicated box, so your smart tv or any chrome capable device will do. the pc based hardware exists on google’s end so really there isn’t a lifespan in the same way that there is with a console.
there are more than enough people that don’t care about ownership or the degradation in video quality or worry about the latency etc, so if the subscription price is right then it has the potential to be another netflix or spotify. the massive popularity of those types of streaming platforms prove beyond doubt that there is a market for a similar service for video games. to sit alongside, not necessarily replace current consoles and traditional methods of playing games.
at least with next gen consoles on the horizon we are assured of having physical hardware (if not software) for a while yet!
A few interesting points with some explanation further down
Google starts a whole lot of projects that get shitcanned 2 years later. Even successful stuff goes down when they get bored of it.
I posted this a while ago on the discord, well before they announced Google Hangouts was getting shut down too:
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You’re totally right, in fact I was talking to a casual gamer friend of mine at work and this was the first thing he mentioned.
Even if google drops it/it’s too early for this kind of tech with our current internet capabilities it’s still an image of the future. Shit can be frightening because I know while it doesn’t appeal at all to me I see how much it can appeal to the general population.
You got me 
I can’t really say I’m looking forward to this streaming stuff. But like Socks, I have a lot to play, so even if I stopped buying new games tomorrow, I’d have enough content already to last me for many many years.
Internet is getting better here but we still get “the Netflix effect” during prime time where the internet gets super slow due to high usage from everyone at the same time. Our infrastructure sucks.
I love Cheapy’s tweet on this:
A surprisingly critical and level-headed analysis from the BBC on Stadia: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47634263
I’m happy some are asking questions about what it will mean for the industry, and what Google’s motives are in the first place for offering such a service. Because Google revealed their vision at GDC they were conveniently able to sidestep the difficult questions today, so I worried the press will hype it up or post reactionary articles about how consoles are dead without thinking about what the platform really means for the industry as a whole.
But still no mention that there have been previous attempts at this and it’s not been great.
I wonder how it will affect Nintendo’s plans for next gen hardware. Although we know there’s advantages to having local processing on a portable console with a dock that streaming can’t replace, the sales pitch to the novice user surrounding the Switch may be more difficult to make 3-4 years from now if the average person doesn’t feel much in terms of input lag.
I think yesterday’s announcements can put them in a tough spot.
I’m on the record as thinking this will fail. Not enough potential consumers will have a reliable enough connection.
Look at the massive success of the Switch. How popular would it have been if it only works when connected to a really fast, super consistent, uncapped network connection? Imagine if it were a boat anchor on the plane and the trains.
My thinking about why it won’t fail is the fact that the service is specifically coming from google. And that comes with considerable conpetitive implications.
Think about it. Every time you google a multi platform game, they will get the first opportunity of selling it to you. Every time you see the trailer on a game, again, they will get the first opportunity.
Imagine Nintendo uploads a trailer on YouTube of an Indie game coming out on their store, google can set up an advertisement for a similar game or even THE SAME game that can play for 5 to 30 seconds prior to Nintendo’s trailer with a “play it now” link to their Stadia servers.
It’s going to be a genuine antitrust issue. And before their business practices can be litigated, I see them grabbing serious market share.
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Google has been a failure at entering nearly every market they’ve tried to. Every now and then they get lucky with something that is outside of their core competency succeeding, like with Android, but overwhelmingly their successful products come from being essential web tools that are just plain better than everything else out there as well as having proven revenue models, like Search, Gmail, and Maps.
But for every one of those there are 10 Google Pluses, Google Nows, Chrome Apps, and worse, all of which were pushed hard.
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I hope you’re right. Thinking about the competitive issues is kind of alarming.
forget next gen, streaming is already happening on the switch in a limited manner with more to come. if its a way for a game to be put on a console that otherwise doesn’t have the power to run it then i cant see how that is bad thing.
Yeah, I think this is more likely to succeed due to the tie-in with Google’s services like YouTube (there’s a reason the trailer focused solely on people reacting to playing games on YouTube) and its advertising/marketing hooks. It’ll succeed because of that, and thus in spite of the hurdles of delivering playable games to the masses via streaming. Peltz gave some good examples in the latest post above.
Also note that Google essentially has the ‘eyes of the world’ via its ability to predict human behaviour from users’ search, maps, YouTube data and more. They already know what the current trends are in the space, so theoretically they should be able to assemble a good lineup of software before their competitors can catch up.
There’s going to be an audience for Stadia, and I reckon most of that target audience isn’t going to notice or care about input latency like enthusiasts will. They will have an easy time convincing people who usually spend more time watching games on YouTube than playing them to try games on Stadia through targeted advertising (linked to information on their Google profile). If they are on YouTube they are probably already signed in to Google, and it’ll probably either be as simple as activating a free trial and playing straight away, or shudders playing for free becuase the games are funded by IAP or time spent playing. The latter of which could influence game design forever. This platform is designed around today’s attention economy after all, so making games addictive through points-i-fication and attention grabbing elements seems like a given target if you’re developing for Stadia.
People often tell me that it’s a good thing that Google is entering the industry because it means more competition, but I don’t see it that way. If this sort of modern platform does take off because of how frictionless it is at integrating with modern sharing tools and YouTube, then I actually see there being less competition overall as it’ll become harder to build a competing service as time passes. Just look at what happened with phones - the market was wrapped up by Apple and Google pretty quickly, with Palm (webOS), Microsoft (Windows Phone), Mozilla (FirefoxOS) BlackBerry (BlackBerry 7, BB10), Nokia (Meego), Samsung (Tizen) all falling out of the race swiftly.
You can add Google Allo to the list too.
But to be fair, the list above mostly comprises of Google services which were dropped because Google had already developed useful alternatives for them, or there were better alternatives offered already by Google. For instance, Google Now doesn’t really have a future when Google Assistant exists on an OS level. Google likes to pit several teams’ products against each other with very little interoperability, but Stadia seems a lot more coordinated and very much its own thing.