At last week’s Game Developers Conference, Google made a pitch to change the future of gaming with the reveal of its upcoming Stadia platform. Rather than a physical console to rival PlayStation or Xbox, Stadia will be a streaming service, requiring little more than a Chrome browser to deliver games seamlessly to players. Spendin money on Google Stadia is but you dont need to spend money on Games just use free google play gift card codes and buy it for free.
The keynote reveal was high on spectacle, low on detail, and left plenty of questions surrounding the project. Chiefly, there’s one question on most people’s minds: how much it will cost?
Google hasn’t announced anything straight away – and it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s monitoring the reaction to Stadia’s reveal, and factoring that reception into any future pricing. Despite this, some detective work – based on past and present contenders in the streaming or subscription gaming field – points to the price the market will bear being around £10 to £15 per month, or a similar amount in dollars.
Some caveats. The Stadia website remains bare-bones, and there’s no word on whether people actually will be paying a monthly subscription for an all-you-can-eat selection of games, despite this being what many suspect. Stadia may still allow customers to buy games individually as the market currently operates, or offer a hybrid model where individual titles can be purchased while others are bundled into a perpetually accessible library. Given Stadia so heavily integrates YouTube – its State Share feature even allows viewers of a livestream to jump into playing that game from the point they’re watching – Google could even go for an ad-supported model. This is Google, after all.
But Stadia is only the latest contender to vie for the ‘Netflix of Games’ crown, and that makes a good starting point for price comparisons. Currently, Netflix costs £7.99 for its standard tier, which gets you HD content on up to two screens at a time. £9.99 per month gets you 4K content on up to four screens. Almost identical prices are charged by Amazon and Spotify. And it’s similar in gaming.
Sony’s PlayStation Now service – which evolved after Sony’s 2012 acquisition of game streaming pioneer Gaikai, and allows streaming access to a library of more than 600 PS2, PS3, and PS4 games – currently costs £12.99 per month, or £84.99 annually. Curiously, Sony hasn’t really pushed PlayStation Now yet, but it’s likely laying the groundwork for future expansion.
Microsoft’s Game Pass gives access to a similarly extensive library of Xbox titles for £9.99 per month, while Humble Bundle’s Humble Monthly package delivers a selection of new games for $12. However, both require games to be downloaded rather than streamed, and in Humble’s case, the games are received as Steam codes, so there’s some permanence of ownership.
We’ve also seen game streaming services that have failed when pricing has been too high, as with the overly ambitious OnLive. Back in 2010, it tried offering streaming access to games for short rental periods or for individual ‘permanent’ purchase, often at full retail prices. Consumers didn’t embrace the model though, and the company was ultimately also sold to Sony in 2015. However, when operating, OnLive also had a “PlayPack” subscription offering unlimited play of a selection of games, for the familiar price of £10 per month.
The measure of Stadia’s success will be how many games it can offer, and how much users will have to pay to access them. Part of the reason the relatively low price of £10 per month seems to have become an industry standard may be that streaming fundamentally changes the consumer’s sense of ownership and persistence. Which is to say, there is none.
A cloud-based library accessible anywhere may potentially be a great way to keep up with the latest games, but what about back-catalogue? What happens if and when a game is removed from a service like Stadia? And from an archival perspective, how are games and their history preserved without any certainty?
A copy of The Legend of Zelda on the NES from 1986 can still be played today, in its original form, more than three decades on from release, so long as you possess a working cartridge. The same can be said for effectively every video game on any format through to the PS2 generation. If you possess a copy, it’s yours to play for as long as it works.
Conversely, how does anyone who bought a title “to own” through OnLive play their game now? It’s not just streaming games either – we’ve already started to see some download-only games disappear entirely, such as the excellent Scott Pilgrim vs the World vanishing from digital storefronts due to changes to licensing agreements. How will players know that a game they fall in love with on Stadia in 2019 will be there to return to or recommend to others in 2029?
Sure, nobody reasonably feels they own their Netflix catalogue but even the streaming video giant doesn’t keep everything available, all the time. With the exception of original material commissioned exclusively for the service, films and shows cycle on and off the platform with regularity. It’s frustrating enough to find the series you’re binging is no longer available – imagine how much more infuriating it would be to find yourself unable to return to an unfinished game.
There’s also the collector’s market to consider. It’s pretty simple – most people like owning stuff. The resurgence of vinyl as premium desirable objects is the best example of this, a direct kickback to music shifting to digital and streaming. Collector’s editions are already a fairly significant part of the games industry, but does that market disappear if the games themselves are only available via streaming?
Stadia’s success also depends greatly on attracting developers to actually release games on the platform, and how those creators are compensated for their work. Currently, Google takes a 30 per cent cut of all sales through the Play Store, comparable to Apple’s slice of App Store sales, and Steam’s take for PC games, although the latter recently shifted to provide more money to high-performing titles.
The PC games market has effectively been digital-only for years already, largely down to Steam’s dominance but more recently with publishers launching their own storefronts – EA Origin, Epic Games Store, and Ubisoft’s Uplay are all attempts to carve out their own niche. Meanwhile, PlayStation and Xbox have increasingly embraced digital sales on their last two consoles, and now host plenty of download-only games. Both console companies also offer what are effectively subscription services already, with PlayStation Plus and Xbox Live Gold providing ‘free’ games to members each month.
Largely abandoning physical releases has actually opened the field up to smaller developers, and allowed creators of all sizes to potentially make more money on each sale. Even if a digital distributor is taking a 30 per cent slice, not having to design, manufacture, store, distribute, and possibly have returns of packaged copies of games is a massive saving. There’s also a theoretically infinite supply of copies to sell, the only limit being the number of license keys.
From there, a move to a Netflix-style subscription model, perhaps with funds divided between developers based on criteria such as hours played, isn’t that much of a leap. More than that, it’s a likely leap, with Sony primed to expand PlayStation Now, and Microsoft widely expected to announce its own streaming plans at E3 in June. If all the major distribution gatekeepers, be it on PC or console, spend the next decade pushing gaming towards a streaming model, as they spent the last decade building the digital download market, then developers might not have much of a choice but to accept core infrastructural changes in how games are sold and distributed – and how they profit from those changes.
Whatever its payment model though, if Stadia can tempt developers over by offering them more cash than other platforms, it could drastically change the conversation. As Rami Ismail, one half of developer Vlambeer, observed on Twitter, “Google Stadia has potential, and offers some interesting potential paradigm shifts for play, place, price, or payment – if those are open to devs.”
Whatever the cost to consumers or benefits to developers though, Stadia’s biggest obstacle could be a boringly practical one. There’s a reason Google isn’t exactly stepping into a crowded playing field with Stadia, and why the aforementioned Xbox Game Pass and Humble Monthly still require you to download titles rather than stream them – some people still have really crappy internet.
Stadia boss Phil Harrison – formerly of Sony and Microsoft – told Kotaku that its Project Stream tests in October 2018 showed “to get 1080p, 60 frames per second, required approximately 25 megabits per second”. That equates to needing only a 3.125Mbps – megabytes per second, rather than megabits – connection, and gives an idea of the potential bottleneck for Stadia. Speaking to Polygon, Harrison predicted that Google’s tech would, at launch, even be able to deliver a 4K/60fps game on a 30 megabit, or 3.75Mbps, connection.
For context, Netflix recommends a five megabit connection for high definition content, and 25 megabits for 4K. Those numbers are for fairly straightforward video streams too, not – Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch aside – an interactive gaming experience that requires minimal latency for players’ controller input.
At a glance, Harrison’s numbers seem fine – as of 2018, the average internet speed for the UK is 18.57Mbps (148.56 megabits), and 25.86Mbps (206.88) for the US. The problem becomes clear when looking regionally – parts of Gloucestershire recorded speeds as low as 0.14 megabits per second in a separate measurement last year. Globally, more rural areas typically have much slower internet speeds than cities, which could still make Stadia simply unattainable to some players.
Harrison’s speed estimates also dodge a few technical points. Broadly speaking, the more you increase the resolution of a moving image, the more you need to increase the frames per second to create a smooth viewing experience. At 1080p, 60fps is great, but at 4K, 120fps would be optimal. Can Stadia reliably deliver that? If so, what speeds would it need? For that matter, would it cost more – a tiered subscription model a lá Netflix’s ultra high definition content, targeting the most demanding players? This is something Google needs to make clear commitments on, and be absolutely sure it can deliver on – for a certain type of player, anything below perfect would send them running back to the reliability of physical or locally installed games.
The argument may be moot though, with any form of game ownership consigned to the history books. The big difference between Stadia and previous game streaming companies is Google itself – or rather, parent Alphabet, which earned $39.27bn (£29.72bn) in the last three months of 2018. While that figure is from across Alphabet’s family of businesses, and it’s entirely unreasonable to suppose that sum would be invested entirely into streaming ambitions, it’s the sort of money that could hypothetically allow Stadia to be a loss leader for a long while, long enough to force changes to the entire games industry.
It’s enough that Google could fund entire studios to develop exclusive games – like the one it’s already founded, headed by industry legend Jade Raymond – and lure over third-party developers with generous terms. It’s the sort of money that can fill the service with high quality content to tempt players with, much as Netflix is expected to spend $15bn (£11.4bn) on original content in 2019. It’s enough money that gaming could become a streaming industry by default in the space of a console generation – whether anyone else likes it or not.