Good point and it's not made very frequently when this subject is brought up. I'm probably not typical but I sometimes go back and replay games from the late 90s and up that I really enjoyed and some of those wouldn't be considered popular but I like them. Would a service like this still have today's games available to play 20 years from now? Would they pick and choose what is available based on popularity of the game?
Isn't it though?
The only people you hear being 'pro-' to this sort of gaming are the absolute casuals that still like to game from time to time. You know, the people who got into busy lives and will never invest as much time in gaming as they'd actually want, realize that and look for a model that suits that - but here is the kicker: they only look for that model because of
cost and ease of use! For them buying a new GPU and 'getting back into the game' is a hassle with a very small payoff, they even forget to keep their launcher(s) updated and when they do want to game, they're left staring at a download/install process. I'm totally
not seeing how Stadia will be cheaper for this group. The startup fee is a dealbreaker, and they still have hardware that still needs its updates, they are still left in an ecosystem that changes all the time - and it comes with limited, controlled choice. Quite a few drawbacks.
Everyone else who likes gaming
and is willing to invest more than a few hours of gaming per week, will echo what you say - especially those at age 20 or older. And that is a massive target audience, and more importantly, its a wealthy target audience. They don't
need to cut corners and yes they like their backwards compatibility, its why they stuck to a PC instead of a console.
So what remains? A very vocal group of youngsters who have zero experience, are gullible, and grow up in an on-demand/rental society. They are not surrounded by ownership but by subscriptions - from their phones (a sizeable part of monthly expense for those 12-18 of age) to all the services they might use on those phones, to all the others bits of daily life now permeated with 'use it now, pay later' systems. For them, a service like Stadia is a twisted form of 'ownership' when in fact all they get is a very limited hardware terminal that becomes a brick when the sub ever ends. So I doubt that it will remain popular for this group in the long run, in that sense I think this service has a rather quick expiry date altogether.
'tis a strange world we live in.
