This Tuesday, Google presented Stadia, a cloud gaming service that many have referred to as the Netflix of video games. As soon as I found out about its release, I thought “wow! I will be able to play anything from my new and more powerful laptop, ”but doubts soon invaded me. Looking online, in forums, blogs, on our own slope ... I saw that doubts are widespread and there are many and varied reasons.
Because yes, the main idea is very good. In fact, many users think it is the future, but it is not the present at all (did someone say "Google Glass"?). In the same way that fewer and fewer computers are manufactured with a CD / DVD reader / writer, it seems that the destiny of games is to be in the cloud. And a winning bet is that it can be played on any device, be it a computer, mobile / tablet or even smart TVs. Then, what is the problem?
Stadia, the Netflix of video games: what content will it offer?
It is the first thing I thought about and what many say: content is the most important thing in video games. Without that content, Google will have nothing to do. And it does not have it for another of the points that I will comment on later. Sony has the rights to games like God of War. Nintendo has an endless number of characters, and it is one of the oldest video game companies. Xbox owns the rights to Halo, Dead Rising, and another non-Kratos GoW, Gears of Wars. In this life I've heard of people who have chosen a console just for a game!, no longer a franchise, but a game. This shows that the content has a lot of pull.
Stadia just been announced, so technically he was not even born. When it is officially released it will have good games, yes, but these games will also be available on other consoles. To be able to compete, Google must create its own characters and franchises, or get contracts to bring the best titles to Stadia. It will not be an easy task and without content everything will be more difficult.
Always connected to the Internet and not slow
Yesterday I saw a tweet that amused me: “Hi, I'm Google. I can't see a YouTube video at 1080p but I can play in 4K at 60fps. " And it is that Google has revealed the necessary bandwidth to be able to play Stadia: a speed of 25 Mbps to run a game in 1080p resolution at 60fps. To get to 4K at 60fps it will be necessary to have a 30 Mbps connection. Of course, they say that you can play with 15Mbps.
And here we have another question: how will, for example, the FPS work without a decent speed? These FPS have nothing to do with Frames Per Second, but with First Person Shooter or First Person Shooter. When I bought my PlayStation 3 8 years ago it was my first next generation console. I still had ADSL and it was terrible. I don't quite remember why, I put 50MB fiber on and things changed. It wasn't so bad after all. With a bad connection, and this is something you discover by looking at the "death chamber", it is likely that you are shooting at one point and your enemy is at another. This is the most frustrating thing in the world: by skill you have been better than the other, you have seen that you shot him before he did you, but the other was not there.
Valuing everything and thinking about it, Google could have one or several solutions in this regard: if a minimum speed is not reached, it could restrict access to some games, which would be, in addition to being controversial, unfair for those who pay the same as everyone . You can also limit the quality of the images so that you need to upload less and be more fluid. Actually, this is no different than the games that already exist for other consoles, but it has been to read the necessary speeds to be able to play on Stadia and I have started to think about all the possibilities.
What price will it have?
I am subscribed to a service streaming music And the reason is that for less than € 9 a month if you pay for the entire year I have practically all the music. I am not subscribed to any streaming video service, Amazon Prime aside, and I am going to unsubscribe due to the price increase, because I am more about movies than series. The most famous example is Netflix: I know that many users are subscribed, but I tried it and FOR ME the absence of movies that may interest me makes me not consider using the platform.
I explain this by several questions: how much will the Stadia subscription be worth? As for video games, I was subscribed for 2 years to PlayStation Plus. Having 2 to 5 games a month available for € 50 a year seems profitable, but in the end I didn't have time to play all of them. How many users will want to pay around € 100 a year to be able to play? You will probably tell me that many, but here we return to the first question: Why content? And well: where do you get the time to amortize it?
Only 1 in 3 thinks Stadia will be the best
In the different polls that I have seen on Twitter, forums and blogs, only 1 in 3 users think that Stadia will take the cake and the rest of the consoles are destined to die. The other 60-70% think that it will only be one more or even that they have nothing to do. Personally I think that ... I don't know, I'm not going to lie. On the one hand, I think that what Google has done can also be done by Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft. If they do, the search engine's company would offer the same system, but with less "poster." I think that the future goes through the cloud, probably for free games with integrated purchases (Fornite or Pokemon Go, among others, show that this is profitable), but first, I think it is a not near future and second that any company can do it. The only really special thing I see about Stadia is that it can run on my new laptop. As I have made clear in this post, all are doubts.
And what do you think of Stadia?
Stadia well try it I don't know ... to think that I would be just happy playing even Galaga, I hate the s. XXI and its clouds. The cloud to watch movies, the cloud to listen to music, the cloud to play, to write a document the cloud, you've run out of toilet paper, the cloud ... xD
Pablinux, I understand the note, but it is judged by someone who does not consume streaming, so it ends up being biased.
I have an Nvidia Shiled console, which is played in the cloud and I am located in Argentina, the servers are located in the US and Europe, and even so, it is played very well.
On the other hand, it does not have exclusive titles and characters, but being able to use Steam games, who cares? There are all the important ones.
I suggest you use a similar service so that you can make a better review.
regards
With all due respect, this article is full of the apocalyptic cavalry of culiprontos youtubers and bloggers, who all in unison already give up Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, when no one has tried it. It is actually an important technological advance in the field of video games by proposing portability with almost no need for a specialized device, but it is just one more product and it will not supplant anything. If so, Chromebooks would be flooding the market whose ChromeOS was released after almost 10 years, and is faithful to the same principle of Stadia: everything from the Cloud (theirs) and nothing local (without us).
The biggest market for video games is in illegal copies and contraband, in the same way that Windows is the operating system in PCs. That Google wants to impose its air-based digital universe (not even that), is their freedom. People will always want to have control of their things, we will always want to have backups of our files on HDD's that we can access without Internet, there will always be programs to install locally and take advantage of the physical muscle or hardware, we will always want to have physical video games when there is no connection to the Internet wherever you are.
The proposal is cool, of course it only applies to a specific market niche and it is only these that it is aimed at. To the rest of the population, which is the vast majority, no.
Now, which Stadia is going to shock the competitive market? Yes. It will say everything with its subscription fees, if they are very high it will not justify the migration since they do not offer anything of our property, only lease, the consoles and discs if they are and can be sold, exchanged or given away. Console producers are going to have to rethink whether they are going to continue selling their devices and video games at the same price, in developing countries, which are the vast majority, a single video game can cost 1/3 of the minimum monthly wage and These generally form the great pie of the population.