Stadia, Google’s cloud gaming service may have failed miserably to capture an audience but if anything, at least it gives competitors such as Microsoft and Nvidia an opportunity to see what works and what doesn’t and adapt accordingly.
In the past, I was bullish on the ideas of cloud gaming services being the future of how we would consume our interactive digital media and thought that with Google’s size and its abundance of revenue, they could lead us to a new era.
However, as we saw with Stadia, not only did it fail miserably, it showed us that even if a company has all the money in the world if they can’t capture a demographic.Nevertheless, Google still feels like there’s a future in cloud gaming, and many others feel the same way. Microsoft’s xCloud and Nvidia’s GEFORCE NOW are both cloud streaming services looking to take a piece of a pie yet to be decided.
Meanwhile, Apple is tackling the mobile side with its Apple Arcade, and who knows, maybe they’ll try their hand at the big leagues themselves.
GEFORCE NOW in particular currently is positioning itself quite strongly with its offer. Out of beta, the service will charge you $5 a month to stream your existing library of PC games instead of having to buy a new game. GEFORCE NOW will support Steam, the Epic Games Store, Battle.net, and Uplay, and lets you run instances of each in the cloud.
This is the strongest and honestly, the most enticing proposition for someone who wouldn’t play a game on the cloud to consider a service like this. Now, the idea of playing your games that you already own on almost any platform (so long as you have a strong internet connection) is tempting.
It’s too soon to say how profitable that kind of service will be in the long run, but it’s clear that companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Playstation and Google are betting on the future of gaming is on Cloud. Let me know what you guys think about this.
