I know that a lot of services start out with clumsy launches, but that number seems kind of ridiculous. Also, after flipping through the list: I’m not really sure who wants to shell out a hundred and thirty bucks to access these games, particularly if they already have all of the ones that they want anyway. Sure, I get the idea of cross-platform support. But I guess that I just don’t care about it?
Well, Maybe my kids will when they’re my age. But for right now it just seems like the sort of early-adopter thing that you should let somebody else scream at the monitor for a change. It’s bad enough that I have to have Steam, GoG, and Epic.
Cross-platform play is great.
But we’re getting that, anyway. (Even *if* Sony had to be dragged into it kicking and screaming.)
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The potential ability to play older games is also great.
But we were already getting that, too.
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As you noted, the game list is very underwhelming.
Pay a premium to play Wolfenstein Youngblood?
Dear God, why?
Does it use your stored information to auto-enroll you in Fallout 76’s premium subscription service as well?
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I really question the entire concept.
I’m sucking bandwidth from a pipe too large for me to conceptualize, pinging dedicated multiplayer servers under 200 miles away from me (in some cases, less than 20). Using a standardized platform that’s pretty well optimized.
And I *still* sometimes catch lag.
Now, if you’re an optimistic early adopter, you’re going to want the processing done by a bleeding edge version of PC Master Race, so you can max the visuals, expand Field Of View, crank the refresh rate, etc. The likelihood of things going wrong expands exponentially with every slider. And when they inevitably do, it looks to the user like the Stadia is the weak link.
Worse, you’re now playing a PC version of the game on a controller. Being matched directly against mouse & keyboard players without the console version’s aim assist, and without the buttons to mimic all the cool mouse and keyboard movement hacks. (Not to mention look velocity.) You might as well set your username to Pwned.
This smells like a test of some sort. It strikes me as the kind of thing that Google might not really care about. But instead, Google really wants to evaluate something that the Stadia just happened match up with. So the execs decided to toss Stadia some money because it would give them useful dats for a more important project that we haven’t heard about yet.