Even though practically everyone saw it coming,the sudden announcement of Stadia’s imminent shutdownis still a major setback to cloud gaming as a concept. It’s not dead of course; there’s still Sony’s PS Now service and the streaming options available through Game Pass, but it looks like streaming-only platforms aren’t something gamers are willing to embrace. Well, not yet at least.
Many may see this is as an unfortunate setback for gaming’s inevitable future, that’s not necessarily the case. Gaming on the cloud might make the medium more convenient than ever before, but that convenience will come with a cost, one gamers thankfully don’t have to pay just yet.
When it was first announced, Google Stadia was going to be the platform that finally made cloud gaming into a viable platform. Backed by Google’s powerful infrastructure, it was to be the service that ushered-in the irresistible future of the medium. As we’ve all come to know though,it wasn’t,and it’s largely due tohow Google handled it.
Promised features weren’t available at launch (and some still aren’t);only a handful of Google devices supported it at first, and users had to pay full price to stream each game and, in the case of Stadia Pro, an additional subscription fee. It was enough for many to predict the platform’s death before it even launched, and now here we all are watching all those prophecies come true not even five years later.
For those who don’t want to see the cloud become all-encompassing, this is actually kind of a win. Should gaming move entirely to the cloud, gamers’ last vestige of ownership, the hardware itself, would go with it. No longer would we at least have our disks, downloaded data and personal consoles/PCs to enjoy our games on. Instead there would only be the cloud, our accounts and the servers keeping track of which games we’re each allowed to play.
If a given service were to go under, a game’s license was to expire or if a game were to be pulled entirely for some other reason, fans would have no recourse. Their games would simply be lost, perhaps to never be seen again. With no local hardware to save data to, there’d be no opportunity to preserve those games for personal use and no way to find them online again since the game files would be entirely inaccessible. Game preservation itself would become a thing of the past.
Gamers can actually get a taste of this right now with the likes of Game Pass.Game Pass is exceptionally convenient and cost-effective, but that all comes at the cost of ownership. Once a game is removed from Game Pass, one either has to pay full price or lose access to it; it doesn’t matter if it’s already downloaded to one’s system. It’s only fair that one should pay for their games of course, but it’s still amazing that one can have the file on their machine and yet be unable to play it.
Such might not sound any better than cloud gaming, but at least the file is there and could potentially be archived one day by those with the necessary knowledge and skills. It’s also not the only option available; Xbox games can still be bought and stored entirely on local hardware. They don’t have to live on Microsoft’s servers, and in most cases there’s still the option to play via a physical disc. These games can be, in theory, still enjoyed years later even if the Game Pass service and Xbox Live were to go away. Such wouldn’t be the case with cloud gaming.
With cloud gaming, streaming would be the only choice since there’d be no local hardware. There’d be no opportunity to preserve one’s own data, not even save files. Users would be entirely at the mercy of the service provider, and given the track record of large gaming companies, that’s a terrible position to be in.
So, while the death of Stadia may be a blow to those who just want the convenience and (potentially) decreased expense of cloud gaming, Stadia’s death is actually a boon for most gamers. This will push cloud gaming back a few years and grant us all a bit more time to enjoy having some control over our games and data, not to mention the leverage that comes with that control. Cloud gaming may be the future, but that future is decidedly unfriendly to gaming consumers, so enjoy the here and now while it still lasts.
