That was the perfect thing about stadia - there was no subscription needed. You bought the game. You could play the game. That was it. No need to have monthly fees, you just got to play the games you owned.
Which doesn’t make any sense whatsoever for a cloud gaming platform.
If you don’t own the hardware the game is stored in, you don’t own the game. Which was shown when they closed stadia down and everyone lost all of their games.
Google has gone ahead and provided full refunds to all, encompassing not only the game costs but also expenses related to controllers, stadia devices, and purchased games. Developers of the few online games that have been available on stadia, have implemented a cost-free method for transferring accounts.
Not excusing the fiasco that Google Stadia was, but credit where credit’s due.
They’re one of the very few companies that even could afford to do that, and they didn’t have to. I think people who invested into Stadia lucked out that it was Google and not some other company.
I would be reluctant to sign up for a similar clone service unless you also get a key to another store.
One of the selling points of cloud gaming is exactly to be able to play it right after purchasing it without all that hassle. No more downloads, installs, game and driver updates, and hardware limitations.
We don’t have that much control over steam games either. Whether the game is in our storage or not doesn’t matter at all. Being able to play it it’s what matters.
Which is why a game streaming service makes sense.
But that’s all it is. A service. You don’t own anything about it. You pay a few bucks a month and get to play games without having the hassle of having a console or pc.
Cloud gaming makes sense and I’m not arguing against that. But not from an ownership perspective. Cloud gaming is gaming as a service in its purest form. A subscription system is perfect for that.
Didn’t you need to pay a sub to access Stadia & purchase the game on top of that? Or was that just for a more premium tier of Stadia.
Like buying expansions to WoW, pay for the expansions & pay the sub to play the game.
The cyberpunk fiasco was a perfect time to have pushed it, too bad they didn’t try to ride the waves of being the best place to play one of the most anticipated games of the decade (I know it was a disastrous launch, but the hype leading up to it for years was on a whole other dimension).
