I was listening to another 1A podcast on gaming (see relevant thread) and this one was about Google's Stadia and Microsoft's XCloud. Some interesting concerns were voiced:
- You don't necessarily own the games, and can't control when they become unavailable due to stuff like copyright ownership a la Spiderman
- Google is notoriously bad with supporting things that they develop (Inbox, the 13 messaging apps they have, Hangouts, Google TV, just to name a few), what happens when they decide to stop supporting the service?
A few of my own thoughts:
- If you're getting your games through a service, then your ability to play depends on the availability of that service. This goes for both service downtime, as well as just general service load. Everyone's going to want to be online at fairly common times, what does that mean for the availability of machines?
- Sort of off the above, will there be different quality models? You can pay $5/month to play all games on "medium" but $10/month to play them on "high" and $15/month for the 4k ultra texture machines.
- I like having a beefy computer in-house anyway. The machine is "general purpose", so my PC isn't exclusively a gaming machine.
- Offline play seems impossible with this model
- Of course there's the conversation about our internet infrastructure too. This model is all well and good if we had internet speeds that were comparable to any other developed country but we're not there, so streaming 4k gaming with low enough latency not to hinder the experience seems like a pipedream for the near future.
What are your thoughts? Do you see yourself using GaaS in the future?
