The concept of being able to jump from your living room TV to your phone mid-game sounds like a great idea to anyone that never actually plays video games.
Anyone who's tried to play a game with a controller on their phones can attest to it being an awful experience. Those designs with a normal controller that has a clip in the middle to hold up your phone never feel right, due to the phone being heavier than the controller and making the whole thing lopsided.
I had a few games on Onlive. The earliest Humble Bundles gave out a few OnLive keys, and they had a deal once where you could get any game on the service for $1. Deus Ex: Human Revolution had just been released, so I picked that up, and found the input lag on it too uncomfortable to play, I couldn't even aim my gun accurately.
Guess what I got when they shut down the servers? Nothing at all. They were selling games for full price, too, so I'm glad I never dropped sixty bucks on anything. Google's track record with firing up services and just kind of letting them dwindle for years before finally bringing down the hammer hasn't helped their reputation, either.
Even the lead-up to the Microsoft Xbox wasn't this bad. The console got a lot of flak for being from Microsoft, but it brought some objectively nice stuff to the table. Everyone gets a built-in, large-at-the-time hard drive, killing the need for a memory card, and bringing forth CD ripping for custom soundtracks. Awesome. It also came out at a time when Nintendo was in dire straits, about to release the mediocre Gamecube while the PS2 was already cleaning house, giving it some much-needed competition.
Stadia just doesn't need to exist. Nobody's clamoring for it. It's something to show their equally clueless shareholders. And not to mention, Google's hubris on this project is stunning. They really just don't understand the gaming market, how its pricing works, or what makes for a comfortable experience. But what do you expect from a cult-like company where it's all but mandatory that everyone have some kind of special snowflake gender, and would fire James Damore for pointing out their hypocracy in the most gentle way possible?
Hell, I can't even try it out, and I'm well equipped to. I've got a Chromecast, a modern smartphone, plenty of controllers, and an enormous library of games. But none of my games will cross-activate, and there's no way I'm paying for anything on Stadia blindly. How many people are gonna buy their first game, only to find out they can't play it for one reason or another? This is gonna be such a grand disaster, I can't wait.
Its such a boomer fucking concept. Nobody wants to play this shit on their phones. I tried using emulators on my phone and it was a miserable experience with or without a controller. And if I have a controller, there's no fucking point playing on my phone, is there?
Not to mention Steam already has a streaming feature. You set it up on your rig. Basically its remote-desktoping for videogames. You use your beefy PC hardware and stream it to your laptop or chromebook or whatever has Steam on it. Again, you're still limited by internet speed, but you still have digital rights to your software. And you aren't going to be using it 100% so you aren't going to rape your internet. And there's way more protection for digital downloads than a cloud service, which is basically 60 bucks for a fucking rental.
Stadia is pure idiotic garbage. Also, here's a streaming service that's worth a fuck:
https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/playstation-now/games/#allgames 750 PS2, PS3 and PS4 games. $20 bucks a month. Never have to buy the game. You pay 20 bucks for the service and you're done. Games get added, you play them. It is still complicated with bandwidth issues, but there's no impression of ownership, it is literally Netflix for Playstation. This alone makes the Stadia irrelevant to me. How do you compete against this? I just don't see it.
It is purely a boomer idea and their guy in charge is a fucking moron who doesn't know jack shit. This isn't competition to anything. This is laughable. At no point did someone raise their hand and point to OnLive or PlaystationNow or Steam Streaming or even the fucking Nintendo Switch and go: "This isn't a fresh market space, we have lots of competition here." They acted like this was something new and revolutionary and are charging a fucking premium for it. Its not new, its not revolutionary. Maybe you should have fought the...no. The ISPs are fucking evil, but Google is fucking worse. Imagine being under the control of Google fiber. They see you're posting to Kiwifarms and just terminate your account. They read and monitor you, terminating all your services for one second of wrong-think. Thank fuck that died. I'd rather be lorded over by an unethical robber baron with no moral principles than a technocrat who wants to brainwash the population.
Also what about trolling? You buy $500 worth of games, Google doesn't like you trolling, just terminates you right there. Or maybe they don't like what you think. Terminated. Why the fuck would I EVER invest in a product that is actively policing, controlling and sanitizing speech? Where they basically ban you for nothing? Fuck you. Imagine video-game reviewers who review Stadia ports on YouTube and then just get their Stadia account terminated because their corporate overlords and Google didn't like what they had to say. This is not far-fetched. Facebook already said it would ban people from using its currency if they committed wrongthink that's totally legal. So why in the fuck would I invest in a product developed by censorious cunts who should probably be in jail and broken up?
Oh, Stadia is even more hilarious. Games don't cross activate because they needed to be ported to the Stadia. So any games you own, you have to re-buy. Its even worse, because of porting. So not every game will play the same and new releases will likely lag behind everything because who the fuck will waste resources right out of release on a Stadia port. Every single thing about this shit just becomes worse and worse and worse. Also no beta. So you can't even test the fucking thing to see how well it works. Good luck to any dumbfuck hipster who buys this and is a free beta-tester for this shithole of a service.
I'm still laughing at their slogan: "Gaming for everybody". Except nobody can figure out who the fuck this is for. Everyone is united in their confusion. Mobile gamers play mobile because they don't want to deal with complex titles and don't even want to use a controller. Hardcore gamers buy rigs and consoles, or subscribe to PS Now for a year because they don't want to buy a PS4 but want to play RDR 2 or BloodBorne. Nor are they willing to drop $60 bucks for something they are functionally renting, can't mod and totally reliant on Google for access.
The only person I can possibly think this would be for would be a casual, but even casual gamers already own a mid-tier rig for cheap or a console. Since they don't play much, they're not going to be willing to invest in an untested service or pay $60 for games. These types usually buy them discounted or second hand or only on sale because they don't play much. I cannot think of a legitimate market for this where the space isn't already taken or doesn't fit at all.
I hope this ends up like the Ouya and other failed shit consoles. What an embarrassment.
