Despite streaming, a Google Stadia version of the game will not cost less than the same title on say, the PlayStation 5. Phil Harrison (who previously was with PlayStation in the 90s) talked about it in his interview with Eurogamer.
„I don’t know why it would be cheaper. The value you get from the game on Stadia means you can play it on any screen in your life – TV, PC, laptop, tablet, phone. I think that is going to be valuable to players. In theory, the Stadia version of a game is going to be at the highest-possible quality of innovation and sophistication on the game engine side. The publisher or the developer is in as much control of the prices as we are, so it’s a bit difficult for me to say what the prices will be right now. But, we’re obviously going to be very aware of prevailing prices in the marketplace,” Harrison said. It means an AAA game will likely still cost 60 dollars. (Plus a Pro Stadia subscription, that’s another 10 dollars per month.)
Harrison told GamesRadar that we can forget about a Stadia beta test: „Geographically, the US is the most complex place to test, just because of the size of the country. And actually, Europe – and particularly the UK – they are relatively easier to launch. So we are not going to do another test in the UK or Europe. [The Project Stream, where US users could use a Google Chrome browser to play Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, is considered as a test. – the editor] If we had time we probably would have done so, but we don’t need to.”
He also talked with GameSpot about the pressure the ISPs will get via the usage of Google Stadia: „Data caps [are] not a universal challenge. The ISPs (Internet Service Providers) have a strong history of staying ahead of consumer trend and if you look at the history of data caps in those small number of markets–and it’s actually a relatively small number of markets that have [data caps]–the trend over time, when music streaming and download became popular, especially in the early days when it was not necessarily legitimate, data caps moved up. Then with the evolution of TV and film streaming, data caps moved up, and we expect that will continue to be the case. ISPs are smart [and] they understand that they’re in the business of keeping customers happy and keeping customers with them for a long time.
There’s a very interesting additional dynamic happening in the internet market, which is the evolution of 5G, particularly in what’s called fixed wireless, which is not necessarily running 5G on your phone but as a way of bringing 5G into your home. All of the 5G fixed wireless businesses that are up now that I’m aware of have no data caps and are very very high performance, so that’s introducing a competitive dynamic. $50 a month. That’s what Verizon fixed wireless costs is for minimum 300mb/s and up to a gigabit. It’s pretty good value to me.
I’ve seen the math calculations that people have done. If you take 35 megabit/s, it’s not always 35mb/s because we use compression. There will be sometimes when actually it’s using significantly less data than that, so it’s not correct to multiply 35 mb/s by the number of seconds that you play. We will give players information about what they’re using and how they can change their resolution if they want to,” Harrison said.
Google Stadia will launch in November in several major countries of the world.
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