So, We Should Probably Have a Little Chat About Stadia (Premium)

When Google announced that it was halting internal efforts to develop Stadia games and rely instead on third-party titles, it set off a firestorm. On the one hand, we have the expected catcalls about Google killing services. And on the other, we have a small contingent of people who have actually tried Stadia, really like the service, and don’t understand what all the fuss is about.

I’m somewhere in the middle, I guess. Google has absolutely earned its reputation for killing off services unceremoniously over the years. And I have tried Stadia, have in fact played it quite a bit, and I really like the service. I wrote about my Stadia experiences twice so far, in Living with Game Streaming: Google Stadia (Premium) and Living with Game Streaming: Google Stadia + Chromebook (Premium).

Stadia has a lot to offer gamers. It’s broadly available on a variety of hardware devices. It has a reasonably good games library. And it supports Xbox and PlayStation controllers in addition to its own Wi-Fi-based controller. Stadia gamers can pretty much game anywhere they want, in whatever configurations they prefer.

Stadia also has some Google quirks. Unlike all-you-can-eat services such as Amazon Luna, which I also like, and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with Cloud Gaming (currently in beta), Stadia only provides a small selection of “free” games to those who pay for a subscription. Instead, Google expects users to buy games on the service, just as they would on a PC or a console, and the prices those games command are no cheaper than they are elsewhere. The nice side bonus to this strategy, however, is that you can also game on Stadia for free: The paid subscription only gets you that handful of free games, plus 4K HDR and 5.1 surround sound support, neither of which I need anyway.

To put this in perspective, we might compare Stadia---and other cloud gaming services---to more familiar video services like Netflix, Hulu, and the like. With a service like Netflix, you don’t ever “own” any content. You simply pay a monthly fee and while that subscription is active, you can consume any of the content available on the service. The availability of content changes each month, too: Some new content is added, and some are removed.

Luna and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with Cloud Gaming both work that way. They each offer some library of game content, and subscribers can stream any of those titles at any time while their subscription is active. And each month, some new content is added, and some are removed. These things---Netflix and the two gaming services---are literally comparable.

Stadia is a bit harder to pin down, as there’s no video service that’s exactly like it. Because there’s no monthly fee (also Stadia has one as an option), and you buy content on Stadia---in the form of individual games--- it's more like iTunes or Microsoft’s Movies & TV service. And that means that those purchases have the same concerns. If Microsoft w...