This is astoundingly cheap. In fact its too cheap, €10/month works out to €360 + €130 over a 3 year hardware cycle which is barely enough for a not-really-capable 4k GPU as it is, without costing all the additional services/hardware. And to put it bluntly, these games are second-rate titles from the last year. From this announcement I guess that this is mostly just another data farming play that will never generate a profit on its own and has a very high chance of being shutdown within 3 years.
I'm astounded at HN's ability to spin anything as a negative.
> these games are second-rate titles from the last year
since when were games like AC: Odyssey or BL3 "second rate"?
Of course they aren't going to have all games (out of the gate, we can assume they are working on licensing) or have exclusive titles (for obvious reasons).
Also not sure if it'd just a licensing issue. I think all the games might very well be modded to run on Stadia servers. May be the renders are optimized to send out compressed video over the wire instead of a video output. Totally speculating but I think it's likely that the games need to be integrated into the Stadia platform somehow.
iirc they support games made with certain engines out-of-the-box. Ironically, I think I heard that it's the Unreal Engine (sorry, Epic Games Store...). AC:O and BL3 seem to support that theory.
>I'm astounded at HN's ability to spin anything as a negative.
Usually I'm right there with you, but Google doesn't exactly have a good public perception around products and services without good profit margins. If they're not making money from it, it could be shut down at any moment (even for paid physical hardware, like the Nexus Q). "Too cheap" is a real fear.
You buy in at $170.
You subscribe for the 4k offering @ $10 / month.
They shutter the service after 1 year after you've paid $120 in monthly fees.
In total, you're out $290. You got a "free" Chromecast Ultra ($60), so you're only out $210.
That's honestly not that bad. Sure, you could have just bought a new XBox One S, but the value of those degrade over time, as well and, as much as MS wants you to believe it, the One S is not a 4K system. It's hard to measure the value of the entertainment you got using it. In my case, I definitely would have achieved $210 in entertainment value out of the system over the course of a year.
Maybe they'll revisit the pricing in a year instead of just cancelling it...
So you've paid $290 (plus the cost of the games) for one year of service, and that's not that bad? I don't know about you, but I have an Xbox One and it's lasted me more than one year for the $300 I paid for it, 4k or not.
I'm not even entirely sure what you're arguing... that it's okay to pay $300/yr for a video game system plus the cost of video games? That if you paid $300 for an Xbox and Microsoft discontinued the system after a year you'd be okay with the price?
Assuming the worst like you have, you paid $300 for a video game system that didn't include any video games and after a year you weren't allowed to play it anymore. That's pretty fucking awful. Even if Microsoft stops making the Xbox One, you still get to keep playing the games you bought.
You are not taking into account for the fact that the hardware will be used constantly by multiple people on and on. I play on average 1 hour of video game a day, multiply that by 24, or 12 or 6 to be more conservative, you are still getting a good margin on hardware cost.
He's right though, 10 is not enough. For fractional gpu use, bandwidth, electricity, and engineering, service support, business dev, and marketing salaries at the google level? Even if we assume that they can run 100 users on each GPU, that wouldn't be enough. (They can't run 100 users on each gpu, but even if they could.)
There's some other play here? Not really sure what google's strategy is, but these prices make it clear they don't need to make money.
I wonder if they will use high-end servers with GPUs that can be used for serving stadia gaming users during peak gaming hours, and then for tasks like number crunching and machine learning during off hours?
For comparison, Hetzner is offering dedicated i7-6700/64GB/1 TB SSD/GTX 1080/"unlimited" bandwidth for €94/month (no installation fee) [1]. Due to their business model, I assume this is a price that also generates them a healthy profit.
The stadia pricing does not sound completely unfeasible when taking into account the 130€, another 70€ from the extra controller, cut from game sales and the fact that casual gamers do not spend their days play the most computationally demanding titles. Some extra €€ would come from family plans and there might be some synergies with their cloud computing business (for example using spare capacity from GCE for Stadia).
