I see one specific market it could target: visual heavy "walking" simulators. Contemplative games where you don't care too much about input lag but having a powerful rendering hardware could add to the experience.
Honestly, they nailed the 'hard part' - technically the platform is incredible, I can pick up the controller and be playing almost immediately with short loading times, no updates etc.
And then they screwed up the launch itself, all the marketing and failed to get a decent library of large games.
It might sort itself out though as they are set to launch the free version next month which will add many more players (so multiplayer without crossplay won't be dead) and equally there are some huge games down the line like Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldurs Gate 3.
I bought it because before I had a gaming PC but to upgrade it I'd have to replace the motherboard and practically every component - whereas with Stadia I can play on my PC with kb+m or on my TV with controller etc. depending on how I feel and it's easier to get in and play.
I hope they sort out the problems as I feel it has a lot of potential.
Think Android NDK, just worse. At least that is what I get from those comments.
It vastly increases the work required by devs for very little incentive.
If they launched and made a go of it? You could make a slow transition. But up front? Insane.
I don’t see how this is possible if they are sending player input to a server somewhere with a 50ms ping. That’s a full twentieth of a second, not counting any lag at all from the server side.
I guess if you play an MMO or something that doesn’t care about lag it wouldn’t matter but I don’t see how you could play even a simple fighting game like Street Fighter 2 with that kind of lag, except at the most basic level.
The reason some people think that is absolutely insane and ridiculous is simply perception. I switched from 100 Hz CRTs to 120, then 165 Hz LCDs. Console games to me are unplayable already. Obviously, Stadia in it's current form is entire useless to me, no matter what game I'm playing because it just feels bad.
However, people who mostly played 30 FPS console games their entire lives, can usually play on stadia perfectly fine. The input lag isn't that much worse.
As for a game like SF, I am not sure. They have MK on Stadia and I hear people enjoy it but I don't know what the latency is like.
This is with wifi hitting a local router, to a separate wifi access point, then wifi to my desktop. None of the network equipment is “gaming grade”.
FWIW: At 60 ms (due to a misconfiguration) super meat boy was unplayable.