Sounds fair. If you essentially already have a TV or other device as a thin client, I can see many people happily paying $12 for 50 hours compared to spending $1000 on the entire console

Yeah like the Google Stadia. I think there was news of someone who spent >100s of hours on Red Dead Redemption 2 only to have all his save data wiped when Stadia shut down.

Edit: Looks like Rockstar did the guy a favour and it was 6000 hours (https://www.nme.com/news/red-dead-redemption-2-stadia-player...)

Google Stadia was always doomed to fail because people have zero trust in Google keeping a service alive if it's not an immediate success.

This is from 2019: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/stadia-launch-dev-the...

The stupid thing with Stadia is that every game you bought came with UNLIMITED FREE 1080p streaming.

They certainly made a loss on this guy but it is far from "stupid" from a consumer perspective.

Youtube comes with "free 1080p" infinite streaming and it makes double digit billions a year.

You can't be interrupted with ads every few minutes when gaming.

You absolutely could though. They could just pause the game in a solo game or detect you are in between matches in a multiplayer game.

File serving is cheap vs rendering a game. A single core can serve many video streams but may be insufficient to run even one game.

It will be $1/hour in a year. Then you will have to pay a different rate for better graphics. These things don't end well. Once they see that they have a stable customer base, they will figure out how to squeeze even more money from their customers. Of course, it will be advertised as something that the customers themselves required and they do it for them, not for themselves.

can't wait for the ad-fueled cheap tiers right when some games publish as streaming only

Once upon a time we spent quarters in the arcade faster than that.

If we did it in 1980 (I was doing it earlier than that), those each would be a dollar now.[0]

[0]: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

Then again, once the tolling infrastructure is in place and normalized, it’s all too easy to boil the frog…

Not for the Xbox though :/

I’m glad I got my series S for $300 when I did

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