EDIT: It has been named the "Stadia" and it's a streaming service. My prediction was correct: The scenes showcased in the teaser trailer are going to be its games. My thoughts on the Stadia? It's going to have a rough start, and will be successful, but it might be the reason other companies might die out or fade away.

Very soon after posting this, Google will make their announcement for the video games industry at Game Developers Conference 2019. The livestream can be viewed here:


What are your predictions? If it's a console, would you buy it?

While I'm sure a streaming service like this can work in certain scenarios, it has numerous flaws that seem to ignore several realities in the world of technology and connectivity.

If you don't live in an urban area, it is likely your internet connection sucks (I'm a lucky exception). Many people I know can't get faster than 5MBit/s DSL which rarely even operates that fast, and cable is not and will never be an option for them since the sole cable monopoly doesn't deem it worth it to extend the cabling into their area. I know a significant number of people for whom 1Mbit/s DSL is all they have. And whether you have DSL, cable, or a cellular-wifi hotspot (ugh), you almost certainly have a data cap which is fundamentally incompatible with this general push to stream everything "from the cloud". Limited speeds, bad latencies, and data caps all get in the way of a streaming service like this especially when you're promoting it as 4K.

Not only that, but I take an issue with digital-only games in general. I see it as an extremely short-sighted approach to gaming. Gamers and the industry, in their impatience to get their "purchases" (which aren't really purchases) immediately and not have to deal with storing/shuffling cartridges that are so massively huge that they take up the entire size of a postage stamp (oh the horror!), are sacrificing so many core aspects of gaming and shooting themselves in the foot in regards to their future experiences. They are totally killing things like trading games, reselling them, and the idea of retro gaming. All these digital or streaming-only games are emphemeral and will vanish the moment the company decides to not bother with them anymore (or goes out of business). It is so hypocrital that the same people who adore and gush over playing their old games from many years ago are also proponents of digital-only libraries. This is going to totally ruin things for all of us, even those like myself who buy physical as it'll push more and more publishers to only offer games in digital-only (or worse, streaming) form.