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Comment by ruph123 | Hacker News Reader

The biggest difference (and problem for Stadia) was that you have to buy Stadia games as “Stadia games”. You cannot transfer them out, they are locked into a platform run by a company which is famous for shutting services down rather often. Why would anyone choose Stadia then?

The nice thing about Geforce Now is that you can just run your already bought games on it. Just connect your account to Steam/Epic and you are good to go. You are just renting their hardware essentially.

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This is truly the most baffling thing. Google could have truly just built a very tight end-to-end cloud hosted "streaming" product that would have leveraged all their Cloud infra to help you play YOUR games... just on any device through their UI. Pay a small hourly or monthly rate (think spot rate for cloud GPUs) and there... you have a business.

Other people have done it sure and maybe that is why Stadia tried to go even bigger, but if they just launched a simple product like that I think it would have been a big hit (and truly hit the market of people who want to play the latest games at full settings but don't have the hardware to do so)

Is renting out data centre GPUs for cloud gaming currently financially feasible? Considering how much GCP charges for GPUs, I would be surprised if they would be able to offer it at an atractive price (~$10/month). Other providers' services look quite experimental and not ready for mass adoption as well.

It used to be as low as $0.10/hour on AWS for spot rates and of course GCP might not give it out at that rate but it certainly suggests there is some room here. 100 hours of gaming a month is a sizable amount of playtime (if you aren't a hardcore gamer, which arguably a cloud -> streaming gaming option is not going to appeal to anyway)

> you have to buy Stadia games as “Stadia games”. You cannot transfer them out, they are locked into a platform

That part is just like any console.

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