Google Stadia Price soon to be revealed: What's your guess?

I’m hoping for a mixed model. I’d love a thing like the EA Access Vault + Normal game buying. New games you just buy the same way you buy a game on Steam/Epic and own it. Then, if you subscribe to their vault you get to play all those games in it for a subscription. Also a family plan is a big deal for me, I don’t wanna have to buy 2 copies of the same game for me and my wife. Maybe it’s asking too much (especially considering that was a bug they eventually made into a “feature”) but we got used to it cause of the PSN game sharing thing.

If this thing is going to have new games out day and date with traditional console counter parts I feel like it's going to have tiered pricing depending what games they are able to play or when a title will be available. Maybe new games will be available to people with a Premium Stadia account and people with regular stadia accounts be able to play a bit later. I can't believe they will offer publishers enough incentives for them to cannibalize their respective existing digital and retail markets while offering single tier pricing.

Does Ubi have a subscription yet? Seems like Google and Ubi are pretty close, at least for the advertisement, and it would make sense to piggy back off of that

Ads are the most google thing, but I don't think that would work without a fair bit of effort from the devs on making sure that Stadi knows when to pause and show an ad. I can imagine folk getting booted out of one Kojima-esque cutscene basically killing the platform for the average user.

I imagine initially there will be a few games Google bought a shit ton of licenses for as a way to test out the service.

They may team up with a subscription model (probably not Microsoft...) as a way to play those. Ubi are the obvious answer, but I could see EA getting in on that.

Aside from that: Internal subscription model that is possibly coupled with purchases (PS Now?) seems the most likely as there are going to be significant server costs for this.

That being said, my "dream" is that it is comparable to Audible in that you can buy "tokens" for cloud time and get a monthly allowance (that rolls over) and a few other benefits if you subscribe. And it plugs in to your game library with various services. So if you buy Wildlands on Uplay you can play it on Stadia if you have said tokens.

3 dollars

Considering for a service like this to be successful and devs be able to be paid a decent amount of money, the service needs a massive user base. I would say subscription. Another cup of coffee I need to stop buying.

The optimist in me thinks Google has to have some sort of flexible pricing structure. The standard $X per month just doesn't make sense as a business model and wouldn't be a great way to entice publishers or developers to put their games on the platform.

However I think selling a $X per hour or minute is just as difficult to sell. I can pay $60, or often less on PC, to play a game whenever I want or charge up time? No one wants to think about their games in terms or month per hour.

I'm also worried what a new payment structure could do to design. If Stadia's goal is to keep you on the platform for months, hours, or minutes then games would be designed to keep you playing in terrible gaming loops.

If you can't tell I have rather low expectation on Stadia.

Can't it just be 15 bucks a month and you play everything that's on the platform you don't pay extra to watch a serie or movie on netflix so paying extra on top off the 15 bucks doesn't make much sense.

It will be free - but when you die, Google will claim your soul.

i mean, it certainly could be open-and-shut $15/month. but something tells me devs just have to look to the spotify model to find an example of a monthly subscription service that totally detonated a product's value. the album is largely something the masses won't pay for anymore- and it's my guess devs won't want that to happen to games. very few musicians have a direct business relationship with their fans. couple that with poor payouts for non-top 40 artists on spotify, and the notion that stadia devs might have to rent server time from google itself...it seems google has to have a pricing model that allows for something more than 15-a-month-split-between-everyone-on-the-platform.

my guess is google charges a monthly access fee to both end users and devs (with the fee for devs scaling based on need/load), and then allow devs to price to consumers however they want.

By its very nature, you cannot own anything on Stadia, even to the degree of ownership accorded by licenses sold on Steam, Epic, etc. Streaming games off a server somewhere ensures that you never have any way of playing those games if that server ceases to exist. When Google decides Stadia is no longer a good idea, it's done, like every other product they seem to offer. If a customer has to "buy" the game and then can't possibly stream it later, that's a horrific deal, and I can't imagine anyone using it.

So, it would have to be a system in which the publisher decides the payment structure, or similar to Xbox GamePass with a rotating selection based on deals with devs/publishers. I'd hope for the latter, so that the subscription fee would be consistent. I don't think they can make it down to $14.99 or less, though. I'd guess a realistic amount would be $24.99 per month, and optimistic would be $19.99 per month. Either is too expensive, in my opinion, but Google doesn't do anything that they don't think will make them money, and I'm sure the expenditure to get this up and running is huge. They will want to recoup as much of that as quickly as possible.

I just don't see how it can be anything but a subscription based on the videos they've shown. One of their big selling points is that you're watching a Youtube video of a game and instantly jump into that spot. Nowhere in their promos is there a pop-up that says "that will be $60, please" before playing. They're gunning for this thing to be seamless.

I think it'll be a mix between a system like Steam and a subscription service. I think it will depend on the publishers and what games are available.

@ralphmoustaccio: I wonder if google would be willing to charge less and just eat the losses the first few years.

I think they will go with some sort of 3 tier model, a cheap model where you get a limited amount of games and/or the games cycle out, a central model where you get access to to the entire library, and premium model strictly for professional streamers/youtubers with full integration with youtube.

as for the price i don't know, maybe 8.99, 14.99, and 39.99+

@mstankow: They will absolutely eat some cost for a while, but doing so for a few years seems unlikely, unless there is some other revenue stream such as ads worked in.

I think the real question is can they make enough money to cover costs at a lower price point by enticing more subscribers than at a higher price point. I don’t think they can initially, because this type of service is so new, and is relatively untested. This may be a rare case where a subscription fee will go down over time, as adoption becomes more widespread.

Thinking of it more, Netflix pays for rights to air shows/movies instead of paying per launch. What if Google does the same instead of paying per view or time played? If that is the case, it would probably be in their best interest in getting as many people as fast as possible contributing a monthly fee to the app. So I think they would start with $7 a month. A subscription fee that starts higher I think makes more sense if paying devs works in a different way than I mentioned. Paying per view/time makes more sense to start at something higher.

looks like it's going to be a hybrid model after all.

https://kotaku.com/google-stadia-pricing-leaks-will-have-both-subscriptio-1835294433

defo a 'wait and see' for me. i'm curious, but i'll let the press run it through its paces before i jump in.

My guess is that a selected few games will be available, with some rotation as contracts expire or promotions end, with a monthly fee of about $10-$15 and a couple free weeks for new subscriptions. Something similar to the Netflix model.

So it's $10 a month, or if you own a game that supports it you can play that game for free. Did they still ever answer if Stadia is only for Chromecast? Or will Amazon Fire TV or Apple TV or Roku also have the app?

I missed that part, did they explain how that would work? Some sort of server side authentication implemented into supported games via a patch?

@reap3r160: I don't believe there is, or will be, any system in place suggesting that if you own a game on another platform that you would have access to it via Stadia. My understanding, based on the very limited information out there right now, is that if you buy a game from Google, you can play it on Stadia at the highest quality your connection allows for without needing to pay the $10/mo subscription fee. Eventually, the subscription will have a catalog of games available to play without the need for individual purchase, but no one knows what they are yet (other than Destiny 2, which seems to be the only game available via the subscription at all at the time of the soft launch in November), how recent they'll be, etc. There's also no indication that there would be any way to download a game you have purchased, meaning if (read: when) Google shuts Stadia down, you have no way to play the games you purchased.

Edit: Upon further reading, it seems that you would still need the $10/mo subscription even to play purchased games at the full advertised 4K, 5.1 surround fidelity. You would be able to play them at 1080p with stereo sound without the additional subscription fee.

@casepb: At launch, it will only be Chromecast, Pixel 3 or 3a phone, and via the use of their proprietary controller. They have said they plan to roll it out to other platforms like Roku, Apple TV, other phones, etc. in 2020. Amazingly, even usage via Chrome on a desktop or laptop won't be available at launch.