I'm in the Nvidia Geforce NOW beta at the moment. It's fantastic. If you want to get in the beta it's running until early May. Invites are going out fairly quick at the moment (a friend just got on with a one week wait).
Their pricing is not released yet (the beta is free with unlimited use, you just have to disconnect and reconnect every 3 or so hours), it might be hourly or monthly.
They do not provide the licenses for games, you just log into Steam (or one of the other publishers launcher you have your games on) and play any of the supported titles.
I am able to play every game (Conan Exiles, PUBG) I've thrown at it on max settings and the servers are peered very well so it's very low latency to my machine and also the game servers I am using.
It's crazy to be able to play modern games on ultra at 60+ fps with a near-native experience on a machine I built 10 years ago.
These streaming game platforms definitely have legs.
Just as with any other X-as-a-service, it quickly becomes cheaper to just buy it outright than to rent it.
And even if the pricing itself isn't that clear-cut, not having the constant stress of "I'm spending $x/h, I had better enjoy every minute of it" (or, on the flip side, "I'm already spending $x/mo, so I need to use it as much as possible") makes it a lot easier to enjoy the experience.
If you play games a lot it will quickly become cheaper to buy a high end PC. But if you're like me and only game a couple hours a week on average, it ends up being cheaper than getting a new top-of-the-line PC every 3 years to continue playing new games on max settings.
Right now it's free.. can't get any cheaper than that. :P
I'm also concerned about the fading concept of ownership. But, IMHO, the author gives up most of his credibility by spending the first half of his opinion piece picking a semantic argument over an advertising tagline.
I'm not worried about the loss of ownership and the rise of "disposable games" that the article identifies. Most games, like most movies, are good the first time but not worth a second run, and that's completely OK. We shouldn't expect "games as an art form" from AAA studios. So why not have a model that reflects that reality?
I'll start worrying if indie games got sucked into this, to the point you could no longer purchase them. Indie games are more likely to become high-replay classics (Braid, FTL, Papers Please...) and don't require a powerful gaming PC.
I'll also start worrying if ads start appearing in-game, and that seems like a much more likely outcome.
It depends on what you like to do. If you’re really into modding Bethesda games you can easily do many playthroughs.
I guess with Stadia modding is no longer a thing, or only supported on a limited and expensive basis using systems built directly into the game such as Creation Club.
This is an awful argument. The author begins by nitpicking at the "gaming is not a box" argument, while Google has positioned Stadia as you targeting a _datacenter_, multiple GPUs can be utilized at once and the very fast networking between Stadia nodes is an ideal environment for middleware like SpatialOS. That's what they mean by 'a box', it's not confined to one node.
There's the expected rant about digital ownership, but I imagine more people will warm to this if it's a Netflix-like model, or if a Stadia purchase grants you a downloadable copy of a game as well.
The rest is a complaint about games the author doesn't like, implying that Google's main focus is Ubisoft and that Ubisoft makes games he forgets about.
Maybe think of it this way. How many people watch movies by going out and renting/purchasing a dvd. I'm willing to bet a lot less than 10 years ago. We're all doing it on-line. It sort of sounds like these cloud based gaming services want to mirror what netflix is doing. Sure, this is already happening to an extent.. but we still have to purchase the gaming console (dvd player vs just using your computer/smart tv). I guess that will have implications for the gaming blockbuster stores out there. If you look at it from that viewpoint it seems almost inevitable that it will happen eventually. Plus, from a consumer perspective you are isolated from having to cycle one less piece of hardware all the time. 10 years from now, how many people will have dedicated gaming consoles vs streaming online.. I'm willing to bet a lot more than today. I own maybe a handful of physical dvds and movies now.. its is all online. I'm totally happy about that too.
Same thing happened with cell phones. You used to have a walkman, dvd/cd player, a camera, a calculator, a pager, flashlight, notepad, etc. Now, you just have a phone.. add the gaming console to this list (and most other electronics too).
Streaming gaming as a service is the future, not sure how far away it is though, there are alot of infrastruce upgrades that need to be done in many parts of the country to have it be useful.
I think you should read the article because it is more about the (lack of) ownership and its constant erosion and less about the question asked in the title :-P.
Pc gaming is awesome. Not everyone can afford it though. If stadia can actually get low latency 60fps ultra settings graphics on low end hardware that will change everything.
One issue here though is exclusives. Many of the best games are console only, or even ps4 only. I don’t see how Stadia could overcome that, but I guess we’ll see.
Note that PC gaming isn't just the ultra expensive 2080ti powered desktops, if anything people using those are a bit of a loud show-off minority (just check the Steam metrics for a much more realistic image). My current computer costs around 450 euros, monitor and peripherals included, is based on a 2400 Ryzen APU and i can run most recent games at mid-quality settings at 1366x768 (which is the native resolution of my monitor, bought explicitly because i prefer low DPI in GUI and for having better performance in games without the blurry upscale that i'd need with a 1080p monitor - note BTW that i got a decent quality VA monitor for better dark colors, there were cheaper options including some 1080p ones if you really want that). Of course this computer will need an upgrade at some point, but even if i decide that i'll only play games released up until today, i'll still have years worth of gaming :-P.
Of course that doesn't mean consoles aren't often cheaper (although the games are MUCH more expensive, especially if you do not want to wait for a while for the prices to drop and/or deals) or that Stadia couldn't be cheaper. Just pointing out that PC gaming isn't the ultra expensive thing people often associate it with (and a PC can do stuff beyond playing games while has the vastest game library of all platforms).
You still need an expensive GPU and constantly messing with drivers and upgrading your system. I guess we'll just have to see what happens but this seems like an inevitable evolution.
Upgrade cycles are slowing, and you only need to keep up if you want the most cutting edge graphics on AAA games - most everything else will run just fine on old mid-range cards. And having Windows automatically install the right drivers seems like even more of an 'inevitable evolution'.
The first part on if servers are box-shaped or not misses the point.
The future is not _a_ box, just like the present of running code in the cloud is not _a_ box, it's a provider running _multiple_ boxes for you on demand, and transparently updating and replacing them behind the scenes, with individual boxes lying below the threshold of things that you need to care about.
Same with serverless "Functions as a service". Of course there are still servers. But you don't have to worry about them any more.
Running games in data centers won't live or die depending on the question "is there a box or not?", rather it will depend on "is the latency acceptable?".
Personally, I believe that the savings made on not needing a good computer and sufficiant network bandwidth to run games with Stadia aren't worth it. And there's nothing that will stop Google from pulling the plug on the service like they did with other projects.
Their pricing is not released yet (the beta is free with unlimited use, you just have to disconnect and reconnect every 3 or so hours), it might be hourly or monthly.
They do not provide the licenses for games, you just log into Steam (or one of the other publishers launcher you have your games on) and play any of the supported titles.
I am able to play every game (Conan Exiles, PUBG) I've thrown at it on max settings and the servers are peered very well so it's very low latency to my machine and also the game servers I am using.
It's crazy to be able to play modern games on ultra at 60+ fps with a near-native experience on a machine I built 10 years ago.
These streaming game platforms definitely have legs.