I was going to write a long-winded post about Stadia, then decided not to and whined about it on Twitter, after which a few people indicated that they were actually interested, so here goes but I’ll keep it brief.
If you’re a PC gamer today, Stadia in 2019 probably isn’t intended for you because:
1) You already have a PC that can play recent games
2) You already have a community to play with
3) Most of Stadia’s gee-whiz features probably won’t be ready at roll-out anyway.
So who IS Stadia 2019 for? Tinkerers, for sure. People who just like to try new things. Also possibly console gamers who’re getting stick of 30 FPS and can’t wait for November 2020 (when the new consoles come out) to address that. Mobile gamers who want to expand beyond the offerings currently available to them. And lastly, “Dads” who USED to be gamers but dropped away from it when life got busy and now they aren’t willing to invest in updated hardware but they might enjoy playing a game now and then. In fact I’ve seen Stadia referred to as Dadia.
Now I (being the resident weirdo) actually am interested in Stadia in 2019. I have the pesudo-4K 30 FPS experience on consoles, and I have a laptop that can run most recent games on High settings at 60 FPS but only at 1080P. I don’t really have a PC gaming community I’m attached to. So if Stadia really can get me 60 FPS 4K PC gaming, I’m willing to switch to it, at least for some titles. Mind you, I am not convinced that promise will be kept, but I will at least try it to see.
My “perfect” Stadia would run PC games with RTX graphics at 60 FPS/4K. I know Nividia is starting to deploy RTX in some of their GEForce Now data centers but I dunno if Google will be that cutting edge. But anyway, that’s why I am interested. If I had built a desktop PC (that I could upgrade) rather than buying a gaming laptop Stadia probably wouldn’t be nearly as appealing to me in 2019.
But what REALLY intrigues me is Stadia in 2021 or 2022. It’ll either be dead (“Hey remember that Stadia service that was a thing for 5 minutes?”) or I think it’ll be pretty cool. If game developers embrace it and build games that harness all that available power (the first of these should be Robot Entertainment’s Orcs Must Die 3 which is using the power of Stadia to generates LOTS of orcs) the service could be really special. But even if that doesn’t happen, assuming Google keeps the hardware up to date we’ll be seeing instances where the PC gamers of 2019 are faced with the choice of either upgrading their hardware, or switching to Stadia; I think at the point the service could start gaining traction with PC gamers.
So those are my brief (!!?) thoughts.
Bonus other reasons I want Stadia:
1) My laptop hard drive is always full and I’m sick of juggling stuff. I connected an external drive but somehow my C: drive still keeps getting full
2) I like the idea of playing the same game on the TV, on a cheap laptop, or on my phone. I kind of do this already using Parsec but Stadia should make it better
3) I’m intrigued about things like YouTube integration
But there are concerns:
1) It’s PC gaming, but without mods. That’s a big loss
2) Will my ISP decide to start capping me if I use Stadia heavily?
3) If Google pulls the plug, my games go poof. I’ll probably stick primarily to F2P games and Ubisoft games since if you own a game on UPlay you can play it on Stadia