https://www.destructoid.com/google-stadia-director-clarifies-that-subscription-service-is-not-netflix-for-games-will-only-dole-out-roughly-one-free-game-per-month--561275.phtml

"Roughly one free game a month, give or take"

First game on the service is Destiny 2: The Collection, no others announced yet

If you stop paying, you lose access to the games. You regain access if you resubscribe

You will get exclusive store discounts (unknown how much, or if it's store-wide / just certain games)

The Pro tier is the only way to get 4k resolution with 5.1 sound

(the last 2 we already knew about)

I preordered just in case it sold out, but am leaning closer and closer to that "cancel" button.

It has a lot of promise, but they just haven't done enough for me to warrant the "founders' pack" price as of yet. Plus they've gone from very much suggesting that players will get access to a decent-sized library of titles - a "Netflix for games" as people put it - alongside the ability to buy new-release games, to "well, you get Destiny 2 and you can play it in 4k with 5.1 sound just like you...erm...already can on your PC. That'll be $10 a month, please!"

If what they're saying is right, I'll be paying $129 to play Destiny 2 on Stadia launch day.

What a great deal. /s

How the fuck do you continue to be so cagey on a promise as flimsy as One Game a month.

The phrase give or take in regards to A Game a month is killin' me.

I ordered the Founder Pack the day it was announced. Mainly for Destiny 2 and Mortal Kombat 11, and to see for myself how well it actually works.

Gets harder and harder to convince someone to join in on Stadia Pro. I could see picking up a game or two for streaming but without a 4K TV, or a 5.1 system, or any desire to play Destiny 2 I'm not really sure why I'd want to pay for it.

Honestly with both announcement streams and their continual lack of solid answers to concerns it really feels like Google doesn't know how to operate as a gaming company. Even with the handful of veterans they've hired from around the industry, they still feel like a technology company who thinks they can just jump into games with a handful of dollars and hope and find success.

Wait, you can't get 4k unless you pay monthly? Tbh 4k 60 would be the only thing i'd use the service for if it worked.

@oursin_360 said:

Correct, I believe they mentioned this during the "reveal" stream.

Cloud gaming is inherently expensive to maintain, Google is launching Stadia which is essentially a new platform with the bare minimum support. Google are still being coy regarding Stadia but xCloud is launching in Oct and we know even less about it.

I'm still not sure who these magical people are, who are put off buy the cost of console gaming yet somehow willing to spend $60 on the latest releases.

I have a friend from grad school who basically only plays Madden and MAYBE one Ubi game a year if her favorite youtubers got paid enough to promote it and she can find people willing to commit to it with her.

Paying 60 bucks to grab Madden and then playing the "free" version of Stadia sounds like a no-brainer.

---

Speaking of Ubi games: I have a PC, PS4, and XBone (MCC and Rare Replay made it justifiable in the years before Gamepass). Shit like DOOM I am always going to buy on my PC and I am doing everything in my power to not pre-order Wolfenstein Youngblood right now

I actually will probably grab the new Ghost Recon on Stadia. Ubi games tend to be a blast in small doses but nothing I want to keep installed. And paying a 60 gig download "fee" to remember why I fucking hated the Predator DLC is a lot less appetizing than just clicking a bookmark in Chrome, playing for a few hours, and not touching it for another few months.

The free 1080p Stadia option seems like a pretty interesting option for a bunch of people that want to check out the latest games on their aging PC.The pro tier is a bit of a headscratcher for me though.I guess if you're google and you're launching a service that caps out on 1080P people will critique that too, so why not give people the option to pay more for 4k & some games. But still.. i wonder how many people will actually jump on the pro subscription. I guess if you want to play these games on your TV you kind of have to huh..

If you want to experience the newest games at 4k to the point where you're buying their controller, you're buying their subscription , you're buying their games, at some point aren't you pretty invested in gaming to the point where you already have a gaming alternative where you don't have to stream the games? Having to pay over $670 to get through 5 years of gaming on your TV through Stadia vs buying a new console seems like a nobrainer to me. Unless you're banking on Stadia lasting for over a decade, and you're able to entirely skip past an extra console launch. At that point, you're making some decent savings.

I haven't looked too deep into this, but when Stadia launched, the story seemed to be that they're just using idle capacity in their datacenters for Stadia and that's why this service would always make sense to have around. In the last few days i see a lot of people talk about partnerships with AMD & meaningful investments to run this whole service as a way to signal that this is an important project for google. Just think it's funny that both ends of the spectrum have been used to tell people that Stadia is going to be around for a long time.

@gundato: That's part of the point, would such light spenders be enough to keep Stadia afloat.

And how many non-gamers have a controller lying about? Instant access wouldn't be so instant.

With Google's track record of abandoning projects I would be much more confident buying Ghost Recon on xCloud and it could very well be a play anywhere title.

@thepanzini: A 60 dollar xbone controller is a lot less than a 300-400 dollar console

And I think you underestimate how many single franchise and casual gamers there are out there. I mean, one of the bigger reasons that so many devs (who didn't get a sack of money) wanted to try out EGS was because so many folk JUST play Fortnite. A lot of people just play sports games . And people who are getting older/have more responsibilities may want to still play a few but can't really justify a console. Plenty of people might have a controller or be willing to play mouse+keyboard on their ultrabooks.

But I also think this is more of a problem for MS than Google. If Google turn this into a thing that people use to play challenges from their favorite influencers (remember that "pick up a save game where the URl left off" bit?) and a decent number of folk use to play Madden, it is a success (until they kill it because Google). They might take a loss on Stadia alone. But they also need the infrastructure anyway and can just view this as backfilling idle cloud nodes.

And if it normalizes cloud gaming then they can use their infrastructure for Stadia as a competitor for the PS6. Or, better yet, they can sell it to Ubi or EA who want to make their own competing "platforms" for the Sony/MS cloud efforts.

@gundato said:

I think the point panzini is getting at is if Google is targeting the "one game a year" crowd there may not be a whole lot of money there...because people are buying one game a year.

A quick google puts the Fortnite population at 250 million at some point in the past. If we assume only 0.5% of them are exclusively Fortnite players, that gets us to 1.25 million players. Obviously Fortnite is special, but Google (and MS) don't need a single Fortnite. They can make do with a half a dozen Blops4s.

Red Dead 2 apparently sold 23 million units and was in development for the better part of a decade. Stadia is mostly stuff that Google would have been doing anyway to lower latency for their streaming and to set up better nodes for their cloud sales.

If this were a full brand new initiative then yeah, there would be questions. This is really just another tier of cloud services that will be used by other folk anyway.