False rumor or not, Stadia has very little market fit.
It's no solution for budget gamers. You still need to pay for the services, the individual games and need to have an excellent network connection to make it usable. It's not exactly a solution for the "poor".
It's not really a solution for most casual/infrequent gamers either. Most high-end games are not casual games, they require a time investment. Plus, in this case there's hefty competition from mobile games, which is highly social: everybody's playing the same viral game none of which are on Stadia.
For the frequent gamer not on a budget, a Playstation/Xbox is affordable and in fact heavily subsidized. A one time purchase with a typical life span of 7 years. No latency issues and a vastly superior catalog of games.
This leaves...whom? A small audience of ex-PC gamers perhaps, tired of PC woes (loud, constant upgrades).
You only need to pay for the games (at full price because there's never a sale!) and your internet connection. You can play at 1080p for free. You need to subscribe to Stadia for 4k and some free games.
In the end, I agree with you, it's just not quite as bad as you painted it.
I buy all my Stadia games on sale, I just don't value the newest games that much. The issue is the Stadia selection not the price, there are good deals to be had.
its a horrible proposition: pay to watch a video stream of a game you dont own that you can control with lag.
why would I do that when I can buy a game on Steam or GOG or even outright pirate it, run it on my local machine, don't need to worry about internet upstream capacity, and I can take it anywhere?
it never made any sense and will never make sense.
And if I still REALLY want those mpeg encoding artifacts and lag, I can still stream the game to another computer from my gaming computer using Steam, my AMD app, probably three other programs for games I already have installed etc.
It's no solution for budget gamers. You still need to pay for the services, the individual games and need to have an excellent network connection to make it usable. It's not exactly a solution for the "poor".
It's not really a solution for most casual/infrequent gamers either. Most high-end games are not casual games, they require a time investment. Plus, in this case there's hefty competition from mobile games, which is highly social: everybody's playing the same viral game none of which are on Stadia.
For the frequent gamer not on a budget, a Playstation/Xbox is affordable and in fact heavily subsidized. A one time purchase with a typical life span of 7 years. No latency issues and a vastly superior catalog of games.
This leaves...whom? A small audience of ex-PC gamers perhaps, tired of PC woes (loud, constant upgrades).