You can also buy a business laptop with an embedded Quaddro and have the same sit in the chair experience at that moderate graphics level without much difficulty. In a lot of ways some of the recent generations for Intel embedded graphics have been baseline requirements for many games (mostly driven by F2P and MMO games) and you don't even need a real GPU just to play vs. having a AAA ultrahigh setting experience. I mean if I can beat Dark Souls on a $300 staples laptop and enjoy the ride I don't see where these grandiose requirements are coming from.
If there were more PC exclusive games that were truly GPU required monsters I could see the point of Stadia, but as time has progressed most AAA games that end up targeting PC usually have a generous minimum requirement threshold, and often its so generous that most things can actually do the job. The only place where the GPUs have been really required in the last few years is the VR stuff which because of general latency of input/response for Stadia would probably cause a lot more motion sickness in people than a local system. Stadia's benefit is capturing the kind of user that doesn't care about quality (because if you did you'd just buy that tower), but those are the kind of users that would make do with what they already had anyway for cheap.
In my opinion this feels like the same slow death as OnLive, with even less benefit in knowing that OnLive's entire focus was on streaming gaming rather than Google who would put this product on ice in 3 years.
Doesn’t it make more sense if google buys this gpu and shares it among, say, 50 users who have maximum an hour of gaming every week? It almost certainly has to be cheaper sharing hardware among users instead of having each single user owning a piece of hardware which is idle almost all of the time. Unless of course hardware price is neglect-able with respect to game price.
The equilibrium cost of sharing the hardware vs owning will probably be similar... the main difference here is that you're also playing with noticeable latency for fast action games which, even if you play infrequently, will impact the game play of certain games.
i'm interested how this will work at peak times, when everybody gets back from work and wants to play? or for new releases. are they just going to throw money at it and be massively over-provisioned most of the time?
Sure, there are lot of scenarios how this could fail and I might be a bit optimistic, but the idea just makes sense. If stadia doesn’t work out sooner or later there will be a platform that will work.
