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Earlier this year in the Game Developers Conference 2019, Google announced it's "revolutionary" Stadia. Stadia is a cloud gaming platform where users can stream and play games on any hardware, regardless of the power and capability of the hardware.
Microsoft is also working on something similar, an initiative called "Project xCloud" where users can stream games on mobiles or any other hardware to play full-fledged games without hardware restrictions. Project xCloud is nowhere near completion yet, so it looks like the first cloud gaming platform will have to be done on Stadia.
Stadia is releasing in November 2019. There isn't going to be a beta version for testing the product or anything of that nature. We will be diving right into the product. As ambitious as Google Stadia is, it doesn't seem likely that it will be all that successful. Here are 6 reasons why Google Stadia will likely fail to stay in the market.
#6. Subscription service and hardware doesn't make it cheaper
Although Google Stadia is only $129, much cheaper than any console on the market right now, it's not really cost effective. You need to pay for the hardware first and when it launches in November, you will also have to pay a $10 subscription on top of that. The subscription gives you access to 4K, 60 FPS streaming. A free subscription which will limit streaming to 1080p is only being released in 2020.
So if you own the Stadia for 2 years, you are effectively paying $129 + $240, which is almost the price of an Xbox/PS console and a little more than a Switch!
#5. Games will not be cheaper nor included in the subscription
A few games including Assassin's Creed Odyssey (which was playtested on the Stadia), Baldur's Gate 3, Doom Eternal, Wolfenstein: Young Blood and many others have been confirmed for the Stadia. However, the $10 subscription you are paying does not give you access to any of these games.
Instead, you will have to pay full price for the title on top of the hardware costs and subscription costs. Xbox Game Pass offers you over a 100 free games and new games per month for that same subscription price. So what incentive does it give gamers who are only paying for a 4k service which is included in older consoles already as part of the package?
#4. No offline play
This is a rather obvious flaw since the entire premise of the Google Stadia console is to stream games without hardware limitations via the internet. However, if you have no internet connection then your Stadia is pretty much useless.
While internet technologies have grown and improved over the years, it still isn't perfect and players still want to play offline. Not to mention, some countries have limitations on the data their internet service providers give them. It's still a little early for the Stadia to release because the internet is not that widespread or cheap just yet.
#3. Internet connectivity issues
As mentioned above, internet connectivity could be a major issue for Stadia owners. In the case of internet outages or just generally very slow internet, it can be painful to play. You could lose your progress while playing because there was no save game since your internet is slow.
While fast connections such as Google Fiber and fibre optics exist, they are not widespread due to the amount of hardware you require to even set up those connections. You need at least 10 Mbps to stream in 720p, forget 1080p or 4k. 4k streaming takes a huge amount of internet bandwidth and hardware power of your TV/Monitor.
#2. Google's reputation for having products go down the drain
Google has been the most successful search engine as well as the most successful with navigation and GPS technologies with Google Maps. But they also have a history of launching products with lots of ambition that go completely down the drain.
The most recent example is Google+, a social networking site meant to be the "Facebook Killer", but it barely took off. There is even a website called The Google Cemetery which lists all the failed products that Google tried to launch. There are 44 of these dead products!
The Stadia is not incentivizing anyone to buy the product with all the reasons mentioned in this slide. The only people who win are the Google executives. So it's very likely the Stadia will go to the cemetery too unless they change their structure before launch. It's just not fair to pay a subscription price without any library of games.
#1. Microsoft and Sony will have better, cheaper and more powerful machines to offer
Microsoft and Sony are due for a new edition of the Xbox and (we're assuming) the PS5 which will have significantly higher hardware capabilities and with ray tracing. The Stadia claims to have 10.7 GPU Teraflops, much higher than the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro.
While that might be true, the new consoles from Sony and Microsoft are expected to have over 20 teraflops with their GPUs as well as 8K resolutions. The Stadia is releasing at a time shortly only before their release.
The PS5 and Xbox Scarlett we assume will cost around $500 or so with much higher capabilities and more exclusive games on the platform. The shelf life of the system will be cheaper than the Stadia (if you're not paying for the Xbox Game Pass or PS Plus subscriptions) since you only really need to pay for the games and the console at minimum.
