[impish19]

Came here to say the exact same thing. I can't stop talking to everyone and their brother about it. It feels like a clear leap into the future. For the uninitiated, here are some highlights of what it enables you to do:

- You can go to a friend's apartment with a Chromecast and just start playing games YOU own like CyberPunk & Assasins Creed within seconds on their TV (assuming they have a controller or you brought your own)

- You can go to Stadia.com on Chrome and just start playing these games from the browser using the Keyboard/Mouse

- The other day I was parked at a Target and I was able to play Cyberpunk on my phone using my phone's internet connection

- You don't have to keep worrying about constantly updating hardware, downloading game patches, deleting stored games etc.

- Time to load the game between saved checkpoints and missions is also much faster since the games run on a superior hardware.

[cercatrova]

You don't really own the games however, it relinquishes user control. If that's fine to you then sure, but I don't want to play games as a service, I just want to play them on my own hardware with minimal latency.

[syockit]

People used to go to the arcade parlour to play coin-op games. In one perspective, that was also games-as-a-service.

[fartcannon]

And it was a terrible experience. Just because it was all we had, doesnt make it good.

[jfim]

Many games had special peripherals or were impractically expensive for home usage though.

For example, the Neo Geo AES launched at a cost of $650 (~$1300 in today's dollars), with games costing $200 or more back then. Some versions of afterburner climax have a servo equipped chair which can tilt on multiple axes as well as vibrate, police 911 has body position sensors, and many of the music games have hardware that's completely impractical for home.

From that perspective, the games as a service makes more sense. Stadia doesn't really offer any of that, the games are the same as any other platform.

[benhurmarcel]

Most people gave that up a long time ago anyway, when they started buying all their games on Steam.

[cercatrova]

Not really, some games on Steam don't have DRM, and Valve has said if Steam ever goes down that they'd break Steam DRM themselves. This cannot be said of Stadia, I can't imagine Google would refund people that money or give them another copy of their games.

[samaxe]

> start playing games YOU own

Except YOU don’t own them, google does, which exactly why I would never get stadia.

[ashtonbaker]

This doesn’t seem materially different than Steam+DRM. I do like getting games from GOG or itch.io when I can, though.

[albertgoeswoof]

It sounds great- but do you trust google not to shut it down, increase the price or embed a bunch of ads everywhere?

You can’t take the games out (or resell them) so it’s a hard sell for me.

[chaostheory]

Yeah, I just got burned by the cancellation of Nest Secure. I’m no longer keen on investing time and money in new Google products and services