I am tentatively interested in what Stadia has to offer. Like you, I was in the Project Stream test, though I have access to some ridiculous bandwidth rather than basic out-of-suburbia bandwidth. Even with that advantage, what I received was a playable, attractive game – but one which clearly had to the graphics options pulled back to something more average. Much less pretty and clear than if I were running it on my own machine with my 1070.
In theory, I am the kind of market they should be interested in hitting. In practice, I’m hesitant because firstly I have a lot of money already sunk into games libraries, with a new one (Epic) on the way, and secondly because I’m not sure that the risk/reward ratio for Stadia is really there for me.
But here is what they really have to do to make a go of it:
The cost of playing games on Stadia and maintaining access to those games has to stay less than the cost of buying improved hardware every year or couple of years. If they can amortize the cost curve for staying at the cutting-edge of game visuals and deliver those game visuals to your screen, they will have a competitive platform.
Pushing against them, they’ll have to deal with the fact that a lot of people would rather “own” their games rather than effectively lease them. (And I use “own” more loosely than I might otherwise because unless you make a full backup of all the games you own on Steam, you’re not really in possession of them. They’re just in cold storage. But you could, and that’s important.) They’ll have to offer an experience that you can only get on Stadia, it’ll have to be useful to most people with the bandwidth that they have, and they’ll have to reassure people that the money that they’ve dropped isn’t going into a black hole.
For games that release simultaneously there and on other platforms, that means that the price is probably going to have to be lower on Stadia to compete with that release on other distribution channels, because the risk component on Stadia is a lot more significant and obvious.
Having watched the entire Google presentation, but thought I had was “what if I don’t need a whole virtual machine of that much power for the game I want to run?” If they wanted to sell it as a flexible virtual machine that I could run via a web interface and backend did it on to the Steam library I already own? That might be worth 10 or 15 a month, considering that my alternative would be to buy a console which would cost much more than that or something equally annoying. (Technically I already own a SteamLink so for gaming in my own house, that’s already covered.)
It’s going to be a tough sell. Until people can try it themselves under their own network conditions, it’s effectively vaporware. That’s the key piece of information that we need as a market to really understand what’s going on and whether it’s going to be a product that provides good value for the cost.