Steam has 90 mill monthyl user? That isnt enough visibility for indies? You are succesful at Steam, you cn triple your money with consoles, easily, consoles tend to sell more.
The problem with Steam and indies is that Steam is filled with trash games. Literally filled with them. Asset flips, low-effort meme games, you name it -hundreds and hundreds of them.
Any indie dev will tell you that unless you're already known in the scene, it's VERY hard to make a name for yourself.
^ This mostly. Not saying that most of the game are trash, necessarily, but the sheer volume of "stuff" is astronomical. If I happen to build an absolutely amazing game on RPG Maker...how do I make that stand out from the thousands upon thousands of other games on Steam? How do you speak to 90 million people?
Plus, once I pass Greenlight, where's any level quality control following that? The advertising is also a bit wonky. I've noticed for a few years now that a tactic some studios use seems to be creating individual adverts for
every, single item that's created on as DLC. Check the full "New Releases" list, and 10-20 pages of it are often filled with DLC content for the same 2-3 games. This clogs up the advertising for any new game in that same price range. Managing filters won't always work, as many games share the same genre or ratings as that DLC avalanche, too.
My hope is that Stadia will do something to quash both the volume and advertising that's
visible at any one time. A filter like "Digging for Gems" would be nice. Show me all games with ratings of
Positive to
Very Positive that have 10 reviews or less.
They must have taken that into account or the whole thing will fail. My guess is that since this is cloud based, Google probably won't need one running copy of a game for each player, but will transfer personal settings, progression, save games and so forth to each ones personal cloud account and the same game is then streamed to X number of players at the same time.
But I do agree with you, that at launch we probably wont see every single game being available, but that could quickly change, depending on how easy it is to modify current games to work on Stadia, if its easy and the pricing model used is attractive to both developers and customers, it could be a new "you need to be on Stadia thing".
So assuming it works as well as Google say, the biggest threat to its success is then going to be the pricing model it self, if they can't convince either the developers or customers, it will fail, and I do agree that if the platform allow each company to decide a price, greed could potentially kill it as well.
My best guess of how this will work is that you buy games normally as you do now. The developers can then add support for Stadia in their games, most likely free of charge as that would make sense I think. By doing that, people wanting to use it will need a subscription with Google sort of Netflix style and any game they own will be available to them. That way the developers won't have to pay Google anything or maybe just a one time entry fee for putting it on Stadia, simply to avoid everyone putting stuff there. The game studios would still make the same or more money selling games as they do now as they can reach more customers. But it would be slightly more expensive for players as they have to pay the subscription fee to Google each month, but on the other hand reducing the cost of having to go out and buy expensive computer stuff.
But that is obviously a guess. But I think that could potentially make a pricing model that would work for everyone.
I will make a formal prophecy.
(Begins a ritual. Burns some incense. Sea shells and chicken bones flying all over the place.) It will launch, and the first thing we're going to hear is:
1.) Connectivity issues! Stadia is now live, but don't plan on playing anything for too long.
2.) Underwhelming library. A few great titles, but not much else on offer.
3.) Performance / stability woes for [InsertTitle] on [InsertPlatform].
4.) My [NonStadia] peripheral (mouse, keyboard, gamepad, camera, mic, etc.) isn't working correctly.
5.) Multiplayer drops connection / lags / is wildly out of sync.
6.) Stadia is the greatest thing since running water! Go out and try it now!
(Pauses. Douses the incense. Lots of smoke. Coughs and waves his hand.)
The only reason I make such a prophecy is because this is how all ambitious projects like this go. Google can't possibly rely exclusively on their own tech. The sheer variety of other tech will cause issues. Same with the games. The idea of devs building exclusively for Stadia servers is a great concept, but there is no way to account for how those servers will interact with player's hardware configs. (I mean...ever had a problem with a website before? Even though everyone else says it's fine? Now they're going to try to stream complex gameplay to multiple millions of users...per title...
simultaneously...? I'm sure there won't be any major issues.
)
And, then there's the actual bugs that will invariably occur.
But folks will buy into it. Enough stuff will probably work to make it worthwhile for enough people to put up with the issues. Some years later, I'm sure it will be stable enough to be widespread. At that point, we'll see if Google can do any better than what we've already got, or if they'll just wind up getting in line for their paycheck.
