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ToasterTate's Posts

I should start off with a disclaimer.  I think for the price Stadia is a decent product and I am in general a Google fan boy.  However, as the future of gaming, I am really not sold on the product. ... See more...
I should start off with a disclaimer.  I think for the price Stadia is a decent product and I am in general a Google fan boy.  However, as the future of gaming, I am really not sold on the product.   I  find the available games, in game performance, size of community (just over 500+K Stadia app downloads in Google play store), and features in Stadia (console) to be large steps backwards compared to the leading consoles and/or PC gaming.   Even if it is a solid step forward in creating a cloud gaming platform. I agree Google communication on Stadia has been wanting.  As has Google's roll out of features they communicated at launch.  I feel that unless Stadia and Google significantly increase communication and become more transparent about feature delivery timelines they will struggle to build a robust gaming community.  If they struggle there, they will struggle to maintain the customer base they have managed to create thus far.    I also believe that if they do not concentrate on closing some of the in Stadia gaps for friend / party and other features it will only add to the struggle and decay of their player base.  The more complicated integrations promised in the future of gaming can wait in my opinion until they have even footing in the console feature.  The rudimentary options provided by the console during gaming are lack luster at best.  Google assistant feature is missing and screen capture key gets hit often (and going to manage your captures is pushed to the 'app' where management of these bad captures is even worse).   The features do not come close to their promises.   Even the portion of the player base who like me think for $9.99 you might be getting decent bang for the buck in free games and overall experience in an early to market streaming product. Unless something significant in features, games and communication happens in months before new consoles hit the market, I expect Stadia to have a hard time staying even remotely viable.  With features that will be difficult if not impossible for Stadia to match coming in the new consoles and new console features that make much of the Stadia upside less novel, there has to be something special for players to stay.   If they want to play in the game market they are going to have to accelerate some of these special sauce feature enabled games that are a differentiator from and not lag consoles on market for games. I know personally I appreciate what Google has tried to do with Stadia.  However, I feel like Google may not have been ready for the console battles.  I personally will be at best sticking to free Stadia Pro content until my subscription runs out and will not be paying for any content within their ecosystem until I see some a clear roadmap to features and games promised.   I am likely moving back to my other console and using the extra data costs I was paying my internet provider elsewhere in new console purchase or games supporting larger communities.
I would separate the service and it is pricing from the game price.  The Stadia as part of the purchase price and monthly service fee is providing the infrastructure including hardware and network co... See more...
I would separate the service and it is pricing from the game price.  The Stadia as part of the purchase price and monthly service fee is providing the infrastructure including hardware and network connectivity.  This includes game lifecycle and space management.  Seem to some extent the equivalent to buying the console and then the monthly 'live' service price with other vendors with better space management.  But you pay for these features as a separate ongoing cost already.   What the game costs after that may be a combination of many factors including what the game creators have to do to port the game to Stadia.  But asking consumers to pay the same and in many case significantly more for the same content in this model will cost them market share.  I know for me the novelty of being able to play on a phone has passed.   Being able to buy and play instantly is a decent feature.  However, if your client has 100+ Mbps download speeds you are not saving the consumers that much time and hassle.   Space has been a big deal in the past for consoles if you play many games but even older consoles manage to handle several games.  Most players only rotate between 2-3 games at a time.  You may be saving full on gaming addicts significant portions of their time but at least for me the feature is saving me very little, and really costs me a ton in streaming costs.  I do not know about others but I can tell you I am pretty done with the streaming costs vs the benefit. As for shutting down the service.  It sure seems like a legitimate concern.  If you play any match made games on Stadia it has been my experience and I would expect it to be similar for others that there are very small groups of people playing the games and you see a representation of it in this feature.  In cross-console save enabled games, it has been my experience that the Stadia player base is not even a small fraction of the player base of these games on other consoles.   Google has in the past walked away from services and hardware that is not meeting their overall goals.  I would not put it past them to walk away from this if it does not meet expectations sooner than later.   No doubt playing on multiple screen types is a feature must for all consoles going forward, and based on what I see they are all working on this 'future of gaming'.  However, Stadia and Google do not and will not have the corner on this market long and unless they create a larger player base, create more compelling features including exclusive or at least current content they are likely to struggle maintaining their existing player base, let alone grow it. I for one am done with the experiment and paying them for old content.