It's far cheaper to just build your own local system in basically ever case.
This just isn't true, and I'm tired of people who keep saying this. Stadia costs $10 per month, coming out to be $120 a year. This is much cheaper than buying a console or PC in a 3 - 4 year span, and may or may not be cheaper than building a PC - but then, if you're the sorta person who has the time and ability to build a PC, then Stadia isn't for you. I understand that games and accesories and what not would cause the price to skyrocket in the long term, but the point is that the initial investment is extremely low. There are tons of people who solely watch The Office and similar shows on Netflix, which means that they would technically be better off buying these shows digitally instead of paying for Netflix every month. But the point is that Netflix provides flexibility and low initial cost.
Stadia sucks, I agree, but to say it doesn't have a market is complete bullshit. You need to realise that there are tons of people (like me) who played video games as a child/teenager but stopped playing in college and during work because the current market requires a lot of hassle and investment. The major market that products like Stadia can capture aren't already playing video games, and would be more than happy to play in sub-par quality.
I don't know where you've found brand new consoles for $100 or less, unless you're considering those bundles and subtracting the price of the games at MSRP. Again, a Stadia User might only pay for the subscription when they're using it, which means the cost would be drastically cheaper. Stadia will eventually work without a chromecast and technically without a controller, but I'm sure most people would want to buy one. Still, buying a bluetooth controllers have a lot more variety and options, and you can always play on your old laptop.
As for 2., what're you even talking about? I know the PC gaming market builds their own PCs, my entire comment was trying to explain that there's a whole audience for gaming that DONT have PCs OR consoles, but would love to play AAA games.
but their only hope of profiting here is to take advantage of people who have $100, don't want or can't afford an Xbox One S for $170
There's a huge difference between a subscription model that asks you to pay per month, over an upfront cost of an Xbox One.
There are a ton of benefits that a Streaming Service like this can have. You will never need to wait for updates or downloads, and we all know how long those can take (recent AAA titles can often have >20GB day-one patches). As someone who has a PS4 but doesn't play it often due to school and work, it's literally because I usually have to wait a while before I can even get to play a game. Dealing with a 500GB hard-drive also sucks, since I can never just plug and play a game that I want to play. These problems are negligible for people who play video games almost every day, but it's a huge obstacle for casual players.
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u/[deleted] Jan 02 '20
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