The other thing is - they must, must be playing the multi-year long game here. Infrastructure around the world just isn't ready for game streaming.
Having said that, from what I hear GeForce Now is giving people a FAR better experience than Stadia.
Now that I think about it, why did they even rush Stadia out? I never got the impression anyone was dying to get their hands on it. They could have given it another year of polish at least and nobody would have complained, surely?
I'd love to hear Google's internal rationale for why they thought this pricing model was a good idea.
1. You can't foresee competition, why give up early.
2. It's a big market, worth a shot even if it fails.
3. Someone thought the project would be good for their promotion. This happens more frequently than you might think :)
If you keep on moving fast and breaking things, people who don’t like it when you break their stuff are going to think twice about trusting you.
One thing: some pockets of the world do have good enough internet already, and they are only going to multiply.
I've traveled in so many countries, and the ones with the best fiber in the world can't guaranty a stable ping for the entire day.
This is what makes so many online games frustrating. I played MOBAs for a long time, and there is nothing more irritating than losing because you didn't get an information at the right time.
Now a non multiplayer game is not real time, so you can put mitigation measures in place, but it can't fix everything, especially for games where the rhythm is important: plateformers, FPS, racing games, etc.
We put up with it in multi-players game because there is no alternative.
But are you going to tolerate than sometimes, randomly, you are going to die because the network had a spike in ping when playing Mario or Cod when you could play comfortably on your TV locally ?
Remember the joke: videos games don't make kids violent. The lag does.
I wouldn't mind the occasional bad lag nearly as much as in a competitive multiplayer fast-reactions game.
I was thinking of eg XCOM 2.
Most games on Steam require activation through Steam servers, so unlikely. Also in case Steam went under, there would most likely be legal issues at play, preventing Steam from issuing any sort of no DRM fix.
The reason for that is as you say, they're playing the long game here. They know it won't make money, not today, not next year, not in 3 years. But in 10 years it could make billions. And getting actual user data and feedback early while you're building the architecture is probably worth a lot.
It's also much cheaper in most case. In average I paid less than 5$ per game on Steam (and that include many full price games).
I have no idea what the legal ramifications really are, but I don't think there's anything morally wrong with the service they are providing. If companies really believed in the whole "selling a license" thing more of them would be willing to provide cross-platform copies for free once you own one instead of grabbing another sale.
As a developer, you have an additional burden of testing on and optimizing for Google's hardware, which are apparently different from consumer hardware.