What do you all think the cost model was? I don't understand the hate towards it.
@KraniX you do realise you didn't need to buy a single piece of hardware to play Stadia?
On the off chance you are not being deliberately obtuse I will give my understanding of it. Please correct me if I am wrong.
There was a premium subscription about £9 a month which allowed streaming up to 4K and included a tiny library of games a bit like a really mini game pass only with streaming.
You had to pay full price for new games on top of this subscription.
There was a version with no subscription that allowed up to 1080p. You paid full price for games with this too and didn't have access to the prem library.
Wasn't it £70 to play borderlands 3, game that had already been out a while and was about £20 on other consoles?
Regardless of your choice, you are paying full price RRP for games you could only stream.
You have probably seen the backlash about PS5 games being £70 for discs which you can at least re-sell. It is not hard to extrapolate from that that people paying a lot of money for a game they can do nothing with afterwards (and gives a worse experience due to the very constraints of streaming) was not really that appealing.
I personally dislike the pay but own nothing model. I can mitigate this with things like the game pass method to get it for like £2 a month but any more than that and I don't want it.
My pipe dream would be actually something similar to stadia. I enjoy minimalism and I'd love to not have a box of a console laying around. In the unlikely event that streaming could offer a native console experience consistently and various price options I'd be more interested but I always want the option to download to some kind of device
This is where I see the benefit of NFTs for digital ownership. Thankfully Google can afford to refund everyone which I'm genuinely glad about, but as we have seen in other cases when a service shuts down, you lose everything you paid for.