Google Stadia: The Netflix of games?
First off, what is Google Stadia?
It’s a game-streaming platform that doesn’t require anything special besides a good internet connection. In practical terms, the average consumer won’t need to buy a PC/Xbox/Playstation to play the latest and greatest games. All these games (and consoles) will live somewhere in the “cloud” and just like how video gets streamed to your browser via Netflix, your video games will get streamed to your screen via Stadia. You now don’t need to buy special hardware and you can play wherever you are, whether that’s in your living room or at the airport.
What does this mean for the average gamer?
You can now pay a monthly fee (price not yet disclosed as of writing) for to play video games without having to buy a console. Cool. But what about paying for games? I think this will be the most interesting aspect, the details of which have not been announced. In my opinion, there are two ways this could play out:
- You have to pay the normal, one time full price for games you want to play
- Your monthly fee will include a library of games
I’m really hoping for option 2 and the monthly fee is in the range of $10–15, which is an insane bargain if the game library is good.
One thing I’m most excited for is being able to play your games anywhere and on any device. You can now move seamlessly from your living room TV to your bedroom TV to even your iPhone while traveling (just need to make sure your Wi-Fi is good)!
For the average user, this solves buying and upgrading hardware, hardware failures, and physical location of hardware. Depending on the execution and price point (less than $15 a month), this could mean the end of hardware.
Google’s tech breakthrough
OnLive was one of the first companies to try video game streaming, realizing that one of the biggest pain points was buying your own hardware, and keeping it up to date, to play games. It also was a plus that using OnLive meant you didn’t have to install the game or updates, meaning you could jump right into the action.
Where OnLive failed was the latency issue. Back in the mid 2000’s, the internet infrastructure just wasn’t there yet. This means that for every controller movement, there was a noticeable lag since you didn’t have a console in your living room to do graphics rendering. It was all being done in “the cloud”. Now however, we’re getting into the era of fiber connections for everyone and soon the era of 5G (low latency) will be upon us.
This is where Google Stadia’s timing is perfect.
The tech of Google Stadia is more real estate location than anything. Generally, the closer you are to a data center, the lower your latency is. Think of it like a mail carrier. The closer your destination is to you, the faster it gets there, regardless of package size. With Google’s abundance of data centers, they probably have one super close to you in the USA.
One other interesting breakthrough they’ve made on the tech side is the custom machines they built to run your games. I’m curious if they will be able to run multiple game instances on each machine. It’s probably not hard to run 10 different instances of Minecraft for 10 different users, which would allow 10 people to play on one machine. This would be amazing from an efficiency standpoint.
Google’s business breakthrough
Google knew that they were late to the cloud services game after being beat up by AWS and Microsoft Azure. However, it seems like they are predicting the same cloud model can be followed with gaming to potentially even more devastating effect.
I think where Google Stadia will really shine is the recurring revenue model. An Xbox One X costs about $400, which if Google Stadia costs $15 a month, that would be about 26 months of Google Stadia before buying an Xbox makes sense. Google is banking that you are going to be sticking with them for a very long time and never need to buy a console or a PC (for games) ever again, which would be amazing from a business perspective. They could also make it very hard or impossible to transfer your games and progress, effectively locking you into their platform.
What I think Google will struggle with is accommodating users during peak times. Most people probably get off work around 5pm and play in the evening. How many machines do you need for these users? What about the idle machines during the rest of the day? You can easily shut them off but you still need to recuperate the hardware costs.
Will it work?
Will Google Stadia work? I’m not really sure, especially without having tried out the service itself. Lag and latency could literally make or break this service. For a lot of shooting games where precision and speed is key, any additional latency would probably be a no-go. However, I think for most other types of games, such as sports and action/adventure games, an extra bit of latency won’t hit.
If the price is $15 or under, the games are cheap and plentiful (or even included in the subscription), and the service really provides a convenience value without a huge cost in latency, I could see myself and many other users paying for Stadia consistently.
