[anonymousab]

> If you have to download a pirate's crack to play a game, you may as well download a pirate version of the game in the first place. I don't see much substantial difference between these two scenarios

You can at least crack the local files or pirate a steam game. You can't do that for stadia games - they are special Linux versions running on bespoke hardware and they will be lost to time when stadia goes.

You can play the windows/Linux/console versions of most of the games, at least. Technically different but outside of preservation purposes, they won't be meaningfully different from the stadia versions as Google never really delivered on any of the game feature promises of their platforms. But stadia exclusives will vanish with the platform. Maybe one day they will get ports, assuming the stadia developer licensing allows it.