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Comment by bradenb | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a pretty reasonable price and I fully expect to pre-order, but I'm disappointed that the games must be purchased a la carte. I'd much rather pay a higher monthly fee and be able to play any games I wanted. I'm not sure how much more I'd be willing to pay, but I just think that purchasing titles that I don't own doesn't fit well with the streaming paradigm.

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For me that's an immediate 'nah', because I entirely expect it to suddenly shut down at some point in the future (because, you know, Google).

This. I got the preorder email a half hour or so ago and have been sitting here thinking "ehhhhhhh" I want to check it out but I'm expecting the quality to be exactly like it was from the first Amazon Fire (the controller even looks like a cousin of the Fire controller, the button orientation is slightly different and they've swapped the position a stick and the dpad) except instead of downloading titles to the Fire you'll buy the controller and randomtimelater Google will shut down the service leaving you with nothing to play at all.

130$ (probably more with shipping) is a good deal of money for me, I'd feel a lot better pulling the trigger if Google didn't have a history of abandoning stuff.

I expect to pre-order the hardware, but I'll probably hold off on a subscription until I see the games and have a compelling reason to pay a monthly fee. I don't really mind the difference between 1080p and 4K, so buying the games standalone seems like a nice fit for me personally, with the subscription sitting as a nice "premium" / improve-what-you-have option.

I don't really see a compelling case for this for 1080p gaming. You can achieve that on very cheap hardware already. The Xbox One S is $200 right now.

Personally, I already have an Xbox One that I lug around with me when I travel. The most compelling aspects of this are it feeling a lot more mobile (since you only need a chromecast and a controller, or just the controller with your phone), and feeling a lot more future-proof since it's effectively just a thin client running on beefy hardware elsewhere, that I expect to be upgraded to meet current game demands over time.

I think it would be nice if they had a demo/preview feature. With the streaming model, they could allow you play X hours of a game per day, or per week, or per month, or whatever, and lock you out or force you to purchase.

Or they could bill you at a slightly higher price per minute, up until you reach a maximum, where you are charged full price for the game.

There's a lot of room to play with pricing models with streaming (if they can get game publishers to agree).

Yeah agreed, I was expecting streaming to be streaming - I don't purchase individual titles on Netflix. Maybe if it was transferable to PC or another platform I'd be more open to it.

> A free tier will be available some time in 2020, as will a paid subscription tier that doesn't require the upfront purchase.

Wonder if the paid sub won't require a payment for games in the future.

Even with a console you still have to pay to play online, so I don't see this as necessarily a huge problem if I have to pay $10 to get the online aspect and still pay for the games

Makes sense, I went to their site to look more in depth and it seems with the Pro subscription you get some free games periodically and also a discount on select titles. That feels like a good middle ground actually

It's not like any of this is new territory either. Xbox Game Pass works like that (minus the streaming) and OnLive worked exactly like that (streaming + unlimited games). It's not an unreasonable demand.

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