[mpalmer]

I've been surprised we haven't seen Google try to play with the pricing model at all; I would be more than willing to consider a per-hour rate for gameplay, even higher tiers for AAA properties.

Buy the game outright if you want, but pay, shall we say, .40 per hour of playtime with a minimum of 5 hours.

Are publishers not interested in terms like these? Google's clearly interested in the "start playing from Youtube with your favorite streamer" angle. A per-hour pricing model would click so well with that. Maybe streamers even get a cut from the first-time player fees.

[PaulHoule]

If they were honest about the pricing model it would go something like this.

A cloud server capable of gaming costs about $1 an hour. It has to be an on demand price, not a spot price because people won't accept their game being turned off arbitrary.

Don't get started with "it doesn't really cost Google $1 an hour to host a $1 hour server" because Google is forgoing $1 they could have gotten from selling it to a real customer.

Also cloud providers charge $0.10 a GB for bandwidth, and if the game sucks down 5 GB of bandwidth an hour we are talking $1.50 an hour.

If you play a game for 50 hours then you are talking $75 in recurring costs and that's before you pay for the actual game.

The "all-you-can-eat" plan is something that cloud gaming companies are offering now because it is familiar to people (e.g. the bloated cable bundle and Netflix following in its footsteps) and people just think it is natural and don't think "hmmm... is this a real business?" the way they would if you started writing down what things cost.

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What we know is that software devs use Javascript on the front end because they don't care how efficient it is (you are paying for it) but they use Rust and Go on the back end because they don't want to pay a dime more than they have to when they're paying.)

Thus with cloud gaming the cloud gaming company will always have a reason to Scroogle you with the hardware.

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If cloud gaming is really a scam to drive up the stock prices of companies like Google, or if it is an attempt to intimidate serious companies like Sony and Valve out of the business, the story that Google is telling makes sense.

If they think that somebody somewhere somehow plans to make money off cloud gaming that's another thing all together.

[mpalmer]

> Don't get started with "it doesn't really cost Google $1 an hour to host a $1 hour server" because Google is forgoing $1 they could have gotten from selling it to a real customer.

Are they though? This seems to imply that Google cloud customers are desperate for additional compute that Google can't give them because it's locked up in Stadia instances. Same story with bandwidth.

They're not losing the dollar unless they'd have booked that sale but for Stadia.

[PaulHoule]

If Google is practicing real financial controls it's the same.

Mainline airlines don't practice real financial controls so they can say "first class passengers subsidize coach passengers, otherwise we couldn't make a profit."

That is, they claim they can put together two unprofitable businesses (first class and economy) and somehow get a profitable business.

If it was a local restaurant that did this people would realize it was bogus, but make it a CEO who is also chairman of the board and people think "he gets paid 100,000x more than I do he must know what he is talking about".

All the airlines that do business that way have one thing in common: they usually lose money. Airlines that don't do business that way make money consistently (e.g. Southwest)

People are going to let American and Delta get away forever with the claim that they have no choice but to lumber forward with their broken business model and it just isn't true.

[PicassoCTs]

Youtube is the ideal partner for stadia- just allow players to run "SavedGames" out of Lets-plays from the site directly.. and voila...