I sincerely hope they won't.

Stadia has been a godsend for me, my family and friends. One of the lesser known features of Stadia is that it is similar to Netflix in its account management.

You can have 4 family members and your games will be available to all.

This allows me to share my library with my siblings and close friends. They can play all my games and I can play all their games. This pushed me to play games I would never have explored otherwise. I am lucky to have a high income and guilty of purchasing games on impulse (as my Steam library can attest). For the first time, my "sleeping" games are useful to the people I love.

It also makes "lan" nights very easy. In fact, with Stadia, I had my first such experience in decades. I can play on my phone with a controller, someone else on the living room TV and someone else on a MacBook Air (which is huge as gaming on that platform is simply not a thing without streaming).

Just about anywhere and at anytime without the need to plan anything.

My partner's GPU also died recently and with the current market prices, they had been playing console exclusively. I gave them access to Stadia and they have switched to playing Stadia exclusively.

Even on wi-fi with a group of 4, we are still competitive in shooters and racing games. In fact, other than issues regarding my own network, I have not experienced lag or glitches from Stadia's side of things.

Stadia dying would be a very sad day for my circle of friend and judging by all the 2-4 members groups I see in games, we would not be alone in that.

While there's a special hatred for modern Google in my heart and I think they're the least deserving to be pioneers for cloud gaming, I have to say I really just hate cloud gaming in general. It's truly the most offensive possible form of anti-consumer DRM imaginable.

I'm not even THAT big of a "gimme my DRM-free games" type guy. I buy most games on Steam, because at least if Steam disappears someday, I can find ways to pirate all those games I bought and continue to play them. Consoles are a bit trickier -- I personally buy physical copies if I can (although that increasingly means less and less, with all the patches and DLC that every game receives after launch, meaning you almost never actually own a physical copy of the complete game. And they even removed all the fun instruction manuals!) But at least every console gets hacked eventually and you'll probably have a way to potentially run pirated software on them in the future.

But with cloud gaming, good bloody luck trying to play the games you shelled out $100 for (modern Canadian pricing) in the future. Not to mention I'm sure we'll find situations in the future where games are patched to remove something that became offensive in the past month, like the big exodus of episodes from streaming services during the BLM protests in 2020.

At least the services where you're just streaming from a generic gaming PC to run your Steam games on can make a bit of an argument for itself that you can download the games to your own computer if you want, and that's just another option for playing them. But who knows how long that'll stay that way. It's quite obviously in the corporate interest to make sure no one ever has access to the game's code on their local machine, and they only ever beam frames to your screen, since that would well and truly stop piracy for good.

Anyone who does any gaming at all will know that for regular non-mobile gaming it's all Playstation, Xbox and Steam (PC). Few platforms will ever beat these three. Microsoft has their own cloud gaming service which is already available on Xbox and I doubt anyone else can compete against Microsoft in this space given their experience and platform advantage. Publishers are already signing deals with Microsoft to host their own cloud gaming experiences. But GeForce Now is never going to take off, gamers don't care and most don't even know it exists. Sony can't even compete against Microsoft at this point as they're too far behind and they're arguably the top console platform right now so the barrier of entry is amazingly high.

Stadia succeeding on it's own is just a bonus and I'm sure Google would like it to. But the real purpose for Stadia long-term is for Google to build out a cloud gaming capability on Google Cloud and sign major publishers to compete against Microsoft. Then when they have enough cloud gaming revenues coming in they can quietly sunset Stadia. This is all about keeping parity with Microsoft's cloud Azure the second the leading platform after Amazon Web Services. Amazon also has a games division with a similar purpose to lose money for a long time on cloud games from it's own studios as a way to build capability.

The problem is the pricing model. All of their competitors work on a subscription model that comes with a pre-existing library of games, while stadia requires you to pay full box-price for all the games you play. If it weren't such a rip-off it'd be more popular, it performs very well at this point.

On top of that, it is clear from Google talks at game developer related conferences that they really don't have any idea how to talk to game developers.

Apple, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft talk about how their technologies empower game developers to make and ship games.

Google talks mostly about Play Store KPIs, they just don't get it.

If they can actually pull this one off, it would be a great game changer and definitely change the gaming industry.

Google Cloud’s problem is a complete lack of empathy for customers.

A few years back I did a shootout between a number of machine vision APIs, I got all the others running in 15 minutes. Google cloud took two hours and trashed my Python installation.