This is right up my alley being a pretty casual gamer. I have a 1GB Fiber connection at home so streaming shouldn't be an issue, the cost is fairly minimal, and not having the worry about downloading or updating games and just being able to pick up the controller and have a quick gaming session will be perfect. And the cost to entry is very low, so even if the service is a bust and I leave after the 3 free months, I'll still have a Chromecast Ultra that I've been looking to pick up anyway.
A 1 Gbit/s connection is a great bandwidth (you probably mean 1 Gbit/s and not 1 GB), bit the latency is even more important. If the game movements and actions lag behind your physical input, this can ruin the whole experience, no matter if the stream has a great quality (few compression artifacts, high resolution) thanks to the bandwidth.
I only used the Shadow gaming VM service so far and the servers are in a neighbouring country, with 100 Mbit/s bandwidth and 30ms ping to 1.1.1.1, so not optimal conditions, but GTA IV, Minecraft and other games were not fun to play due to the input lag.
This all depends on where you live and the infrastructure. I have 1 Gbit fiber, but in my country nearly all the infrastructure is concentrated in one of 2 cities, so I still have minimum 15/30ms (IPv6/IPv4) ping to everything since it has to travel across the country.
Not sure if you already accounted for this, but the monthly subscription only includes a subset of their catalog. For any game outside of that you’ll need to pay for the subscription plus purchase the game.
So yes, if the game(s) you want to play one of the included games and the service goes bust you don’t lose much. If you purchased a title and service goes bust then you likely lost that money.
$10/mo * 12 = $120/yr and still paying $60/game for AAA. Alternatively, there is supposed to be a "basic" option coming in 2020 with no subscription fee where you just pay for each game but then what happens when Google gives Stadia the axe? Will users be able to claim licenses or local copies of games they paid for?
As opposed to paying $60/yr for PS Plus + $60/game for PS4 or next gen PS5?
The basic version is also free, which is something Sony isn't going to be able to offer me. But with Stadia I can play on my TV, on my desktop, on the go, etc.
I buy most of my games digitally whether or PSN or Steam. If either of those go out of business, I'm pretty much SOL. I don't see Google allowing you to claim your license for local copies as the Stadia hardware is specialized and custom, not something you can emulate easily outside of it's infrastructure, but that's a risk I'm willing to take.
Honest question now, you say you're a casual gamer, do you have a pc with a video card? With a gigabit connection, updates are really a non-issue. I can't see why people with even moderate gaming rigs ($150 gpu) would bother with this service? Is 4k really that big of a deal?
I have a pretty beefy gaming PC that I almost never game on. 4K isn't a huge deal for me. Convenience is.
I'm tired of updating my GPU drivers and experinece (5-10 minutes), then launching Steam, waiting for it to update and restart (2-3 minutes), then picking the game I want to play, waiting for it to update and install (5-10 minutes), then finally launch the game and have it spend more time connecting to servers before I can game.
The value prop of seeing a game trailer or game video that seems interesting and being able to say "play with stadia" and it just throwing me right into the game is the feature that speaks most to me.
If Stadia does this and it works well enough, i'll gladly get rid of gaming PC.
>I'm tired of updating my GPU drivers and experinece (5-10 minutes)
I never understood this complaint. You can be perfectly fine running GPU drivers from a year ago. You don't need to update them every day.
With Steam, it "updating" every time you run it seems to be a lie really, but I think most people who run Steam just leave it always on.
The games, I have 400 on Steam. Maybe 1-3 update per day on average, and there's lot's of overlap ie 90% of my library hasn't updated in a year, and 9% of the leftover updates maybe once a month.
