Stadia Changes Revenue model; What’s For The Player?

I’ve been doing this rundown on previous events a lot lately. So I’ll jump the gun and say: On the next exciting episode of Keiran moans about online streaming services, maybe Google will put themselves out of our misery and plainly cap Stadia in the back of the head. I think it is fair to say; I’ve not been all that kind to Google’s attempt at the gaming market. Some would argue that it is unfair. Unfair as I’m not moaning about Xbox, PlayStation, Nvidia, or even Amazon’s similar attempts, at least not with the same pomposity that I seek Stadia out with an anti-cloud cannon.

The truth is, I don’t like them either. My recent experiences with Steam Link would say it is also an awful streaming variant. Then again, that’s what I get for wanting to play Mini Motorways on a sixty-something inch 4K TV, to show it off a little to someone else. I thought it was a better idea than crowding around a small laptop, but that’s what I get for trying to observe COVID restrictions as much as I can. Anyway, that was a whole unnecessary tangent about my general displeasure with streaming services, so I don’t get as many emails.

It was recently announced that Google Stadia has changed its revenue model, because that’s what you do when your business is working perfectly fine. Ok, baiting the one-Stadia owner that is more than happy with the service aside, it is a strange move to pull. Especially for a service that is (supposedly) “alive and well.” This is from the platform that only recently added a search function, with the term “search function” being surpassed in the last three decades by the platform’s actual namesake, Google. Orwell couldn’t make that up.

Unsurprisingly, this isn’t blasted all over the Google Stadia community forums. Instead, they have been doing updates to Stadia Weekly, a beige man’s idea of an exciting newsletter. It was last week when the news broke all over, from The Verge to Eurogamer and beyond. In essence, it is offering developer’s money for going through the platform’s subscription service. They are offering about $10 for every player that plays through the Pro model, but only after a certain amount of $500 has been hit do they payout. Ah, I remember my early YouTube days well, when revenue was something you could make from that platform.

Anyway, flashbacks aside, this sounds like a more enticing idea for developers. However, as I’ve said time and time again, platforms like this in their infancy don’t always need to be a martyr for the greater good, but it can help. I used it as an example before when asking “what the point” of the platform is after the closure of the internal development studios. Studio closures that lead to several staff leaving to join what Jade Raymond created, Haven (on earth). I believe Belinda Carlisle was predicting the future in the 80s.

Ok, being serious for a moment, not everyone has the ability to play on the system. This isn’t some limp-wrist anti-capitalism nonsense about consoles being $500, and the pandemic’s economic instability creating a burgeoning gap between middle-class and poor. Though there is a case of expense being quite a high bar for some, my point is something a little more basic than that. People need a strong-reliable connection to the internet that is sufficient enough for Stadia. Some of the most ardent defenders of the platform will say that you don’t need the world’s greatest connection, but they are ignoring the downside.

As you can guess, with a streaming service there is this thing called compression, which tries to shrink the amount of data being sent to save on bandwidth. That’s fine, every streaming service does that, even YouTube and Netflix. However, if you’ve ever tried to watch a video on YouTube that has included snow or confetti, there is a significant dip in quality, and that is entirely down to the video compression. Now, a number of video games (Hi Sony and the PS4’s early days!) put a lot of reliance on particle effects being their shiny new toy to justify the large purchase. That’s what snow is, a particle effect in a game.

Of course, not all games are like The Division and set in a snowy pandemic riddled New York. Nonetheless, a number do still feature sparks from metal on metal, falling embers in a fire, or several other high detail specs of dust. Then there is the requirement for distance, which can also be a bit of a pixelated grey area once you add video compression into the mix. I’m thinking Fortnite, Borderlands, and the Rainbow Six Sieges of the world, all asking you to shoot off into some distance and be precise. I’m not saying you can’t still enjoy them. I’m just asking, why Stadia over another platform?

Other platforms do have their downsides, they always will, but they have many of the basic features Stadia simply doesn’t. For one, you can play offline, which if you live in a poorly serviced section of America (or elsewhere) can be often or periodically as maintenance is done at 2 AM, on a Wednesday, be in the middle of doing work. I’m not bitter as that has happened just before an auto-saved, activated, and saved-20 minutes of work, honest. Ok, some aren’t like me, and they actually enjoy always online. The question then becomes quality. Say there is a spec of dust in the pixelated distance in Fortnite, how do you tell if it is a Eurasian Blue Tit or a luminescent banana wearing a blue cape?

Luckily, with a standard console, all you have to worry about is the infinitesimal lag because video compression isn’t an issue for you. Though, the point I am trying to make, no matter how odd you might find it, is that not everyone has inner-city stability or high bit-rates at low-ish prices. For example, in the UK, Broadband Savvy looked into the expense of rural internet and found that those (of the 2000 people surveyed) in the UK’s rural areas pay 76% more for 22% less reliable connections. Meanwhile, the UK government is committing £22 million to the expansion of gigabit-capable broadband, mostly in urban developments.

The UK isn’t the largest, most rural, or most populated on the planet (unless you believe UKIP). I’m using it as an example and it is easy to find those numbers without much searching (or Googling). Of course, you don’t need gigabit internet to play on Stadia, but if basic broadband in rural areas can be that expensive and less reliable, it might be better just to buy a normal console. The point is that the system can work well for those in Silicon Valley, L,A, New York, or other densely populated areas. Drift out of cities, into small villages of a couple of hundred people, of far spread out farmlands and islands sparsely populated, and it is not a system that works for them all too well.

Though this new revenue model seems to work for developers, taking larger cuts home and flat rates for converting players to Stadia Pro subscriptions. I’m left asking what it is that the player is getting out of this overall? If the share is larger, more developers might come over for a slice of the pie, but a majority of developers already live in the land of the Epic Games Store, Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo. The last of which is using cloud streaming for larger games that might not run on the Switch’s own hardware, and it is a horrid little experience, last I checked.

So that kind of cuts the nose off to spite the face in some ways, not increasing the number of exclusives but just the number of developers wanting the money. I’m not trying to be cold, cruel, or vindictive towards developers. I can understand why a smaller studio may do that, to expand profits of what may be a limited fan base already. I’m also sure we can all agree that when there is money on the table, larger developers/publishers (EA, 2K, and otherwise) will always go sniffing. It is the cold-hard truth that this is aimed at benefiting developers, hence why this was only announced at the developer’s keynote and not blasted across community hubs.

I do concede that Stadia (for some) does have benefits that improve on some aspects of gaming: A lack of daily multi-gigabyte updates, storage of boxes that someone might not have the space for, and console size. Under Stadia, that is all at Google’s house (server farms) and you don’t have to worry about it. I can see the appeal of that, but maybe I am just a little too old for this to be the appeal that pulls me to the overcast-side. Shut up, that is a brilliant cloud-cover/Star Wars joke, I’ll have no grumbling about it.

With those concessions in mind, I’ve been left once again asking, what is so pro-consumer in this Cloud-based future? You no longer own the purchase, you are merely granted access to it. You are not even in the same postcode as the game. You are hardly getting more of something, you are getting less of it. If it is the subscription service, I’d argue the best of those is Xbox Game Pass with its massive library across PC, console, and xCloud. The point I made before was the sacrificed Sega Channel, the progenitor of console downloads in 1994(!), to expand and clean up static noise through cable signals. It ultimately improved the infrastructure of cable for all as we know it.

I’m not asking Stadia to fall on the sword. I am saying that something needs to improve the infrastructure before a system like this works and does so, well, at the same time. For some, the system works and that’s perfectly fine, but for the system to have longevity, it needs to appeal to a larger number of people. At the moment, the system is being adopted by what is a small group, hence the revenue share model switch-up. So the question becomes, what do people want from a gaming platform?

If the recently announced Steam Deck from Valve, the company that has been copying Nintendo’s homework over these last few years, is anything to go by, it is handhelds. If you ask Xbox and their Series X/S range, it is as many teraflops as possible, whatever a teraflop is? For Sony, it is sticking with a solid set of exclusives that you’ll put on your weird-shaped consoles for a bit before porting to PC. Then, if you ask Nintendo: Well, they have been busy flicking pens up their bum on and off again for a while. The Wii U was awful and the Switch is a hit, Super Mario Odyssey was a hit and Mario Golf is seriously not. It is a bit of a mixed bag really.

My point is, you can’t analyze one approach as the ultimate point of view. Every company is doing something a little different. They do provide similar features in some regards, but for every lifestyle, there is something a nurse could want that a farmer might not. The same could be said of a person who works from home and someone who never gets to be at home thanks to work. There is (of course) further granularity that one may wish to go to in picking their console for the next few years. From the number of games, the type of games often featured on that platform, and the system’s own power output dictating how games look or feel.

For the most part, cloud gaming’s biggest issue is the availability and cost of the internet. In densely populated areas like cities there will be coffee shops and bars with wifi, which is often free for customers. One thing the Switch, and I guess the Steam Deck, have over cloud gaming is being able to play in a field or a park without wifi despite the screen being a bit dodgy with sunlight. This is where our fantasies of the future have free wifi available everywhere you go, but alas, we’re stuck on this crummy timeline. So more affluent busy city folks win again.

This is the biggest thing for me, the ability to be on the go. I love a good handheld console. The DS range might not have been the most comfortable range but I love it, they are great things for kids who were outside but liked games. With that all but gone, kids spend a little more time inside doing whatever it is kids do. I hear they like vaping that new drug Tik-Tok as they Fortnite their friends, which I think is a euphemism for sex. Ok, that joke only works if you forget that I spoke about Fortnite twice already.

Though I think that shows my age more than anything: I think of kids as the core audience of games, even though I am an adult that writes about them (games, not kids) a little too much. There are adults now, during lunch breaks and such, who need to fill that time with something and handhelds are perfect for that. This is how mobile gaming took off after we advanced past Solitaire and Snake. We see games described as “the perfect time-waster/killer” for that very reason. Don’t kill/waste your time, use it to play good games, not microtransaction-heavy hellscapes.

This, I think, is where Stadia falls down for me, promoting things likes of Grand Theft Horse 2, or as Google boasted during the keynote for being quite a stable place to play it, Cyberpunk 2077. I don’t believe these are games that you “pick up and play.” For a lunch break or moments like that, you want Spelunky, something that makes you say, “one more round” before you do a further three and end up getting fired.

I hate to use what is such a gatekeeping term, but they aren’t something you play casually for short amounts of time. To me, Red Dead Redemption 2 is something you play for at least a couple of hours, and I know I say this with a completely different opinion of the game to some. To use the second awful term used by gatekeepers, Stadia is trying to be the replacement for “hardcore” gamers which I don’t think is the best place to go searching for a cloud-gaming system. Those are the people that care about lag, frame rates, and such to the nth degree.

I’m not saying Stadia should be going for a “casual” market either. I also don’t think Rogue-likes are this “casual” but they do tend to be widely popular like the Battle Royale genre. This more drop-in and drop-out “casual” market might just be the audience they should be aimed toward. People on the go, people who might not want to spend hundreds of dollars on gaming or systems for such, but do enjoy it. Take a chunk out of mobile gaming, as that’s a core of what Stadia is already aiming towards, the city people that sit at coffee shops or bars with free wifi.

I just think those who want to sit on their couch and play a game on their TV will own a PS4/PS5 or Xbox One (S/X)/Xbox Series S/X. Someone that wants to play while watching TV will own a Switch. Those who want PC-centric games will probably get a PC of reasonable means for their use. So, this leaves us without a free space for Stadia, Luna, and others to really fit in without squeezing their way into an already filled market. By all means, I want to see what cloud gaming can be when it is given the space to be, maybe not dominant, but substantial.

The images of controls (either Xbox or knock-off Xbox controllers) with phones strapped to them do suggest you can play anywhere, but without wifi everywhere for free that is a little hard. I keep saying it, the idea of cloud gaming is there but the infrastructure isn’t. I hate to say it, but it is something that is, more or less, ahead of its time in respect to technology and the idea of what we currently have. I think we are more or less being idealistic and hopeful of what cloud gaming can be right now, when it is not carving up a new section of fans or being that ideal we hope it can be. Not for everyone, only for a select few.