Comment by bscphil
5 years ago
Yours is a thoughtful post and doesn't deserve a quick, dismissive response, so I want to hedge the following just by acknowledging that.
I'd say your problems 1-3 can be summarized by saying you don't think there's a market for it. I don't think I agree. The prospective market for it is probably console gamers who want to play PC games that aren't ported to their console.
Even CP2077 might be an example of this, because from what I've heard the performance is absolutely terrible on consoles, and if you haven't already spent heavily on an upgraded computer with a graphics card that's going to set you back $1K, you probably can't play it there either. So if you're the stereotypical console gamer, who doesn't care about perfect graphics and the lowest possible latencies, Stadia is going to sound like a pretty decent deal.
And that's before you get to exclusives.
- CP2077 could be viewed as a one time inter-generational fluke, where a project was designed with the ambition of PS5, then half-heartedly fitted into a PS4. Once people get their next gen consoles, this use case probably goes away. Can you imagine a lot more of these CP2077-like scenarios that justify being a Stadia user?
- Stadia will be just as vulnerable to "exclusive content fragmentation" as consoles. Now that they've shuttered their internal studio, they will in fact, be constantly on the defensive in the war of exclusive content.
Yeah, I was only using Cyberpunk as an example of how a console player might play a game on Stadia that was released on their console if it performed better. (Or even equivalently, since Stadia has other advantages like easy travel.) But I think the much bigger draw will be for games that are PC exclusives or PC/XBOX, for Playstation folks.
I suppose it remains to be seen how successful Stadia will be at pull these titles to its platform. I think you're right to worry about fragmentation. If developers view Stadia as "just another platform" that they can just choose not to support when creating exclusives, it'll fail. If Stadia can get them to view it as a kind of drop-in that lets a much larger number of people (with, say, underpowered hardware) play their game, they'll be more likely to view it as a win.
One other plausible market: people for whom the upfront cost of a platform is still too high. It's a lot easier for most parents to justify buying Cyberpunk for Stadia for their kid for Christmas than it is a brand new $500 console, or God forbid the several thousand dollar PC you'd need to play it.