Google Stadia is launching on 19 November with twelve games. That is if you are lucky enough to live in one of the countries where it will be available and, of course, only if you have paid for the pre-order and premium tier. And even that does not guarantee you will have access, since they are doing a phased launch: first come first served. There may be up to a two week wait for some who pre-ordered.
I think to an extent the success or failure of this service will depend on the experience. Yes, there needs to be a good selection of titles, but this will obviously grow over time. But loads of games will all be for naught if there is stuttering or disconnects. This is a streaming service after all, and all of them experience such issues. It will be much worse trying to play a game this way than watching a movie.
The Nintendo WIi launched with 14 titles… And we all know how that ended. The PS2 launched with something like 25 titles, and the PS2 is historic. The games list here is not that bad. The problem is most people in gaming would have played or even owned most of the titles here. So how recent they can keep their list is what will make / or break the one half of the Stadia success.
The other is obviously how playable and enjoyable the experience is. Any news of local servers at any time?
Yeah, this may end up being one of those short-lived experiments (like the first version of Glass) which generates some initial hype and then gets killed off quietly.
But hey, at least they’re willing to try things. Google have never been scared of taking some risks with services that end up failing. Every so often one succeeds.
Stadia have just announced a few more games added to their launch week line up, and a handful more by year end, so they do have that going for them. Some decent titles there now:
But this has been a catastrophe from start to finish during my testing phase, and the problem is that even if it did work flawlessly, which it absolutely doesn’t, the entire model seemed doomed from the start. This is an enormous miss from Google, and I am really wondering what the fallout is going to be from this ill-conceived early launch.
Yeah, I was also dubious about charging for access to the service and then asking people to buy the games at full retail price, which are locked to a cloud platform that could go up in smoke at any time.
Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
The rumor mill suggests that Google may be looking to kill off its game streaming platform, Stadia, for good before the end of the year.
