Thursday, June 6, 2019


TECH



Stadia Will Offer Monthly Subscription Plans, Pricing and Other Details Leaked Ahead Of Launch

Several companies have tried their hands at Cloud Gaming, where servers of the heavy lifting and the game is streamed on the user's device. It's a difficult feat to pull off for a lot of varying reasons like input lag, load distribution, and latency. Google is one of the few companies that can do this right and they undertook the challenge of creating such a platform. Stadia was finally unveiled in March this year with the beta offering access to Assassin's Creed Odyssey.
Pricing and other details will be revealed today at GDC, but it seems the news site has spilled the beans early.

Pricing
According to the leaked report, Stadia will follow the monthly subscription model. It will be priced at $ 10 per month for the pro subscription which includes streaming up to 4K / 60. Google will also launch a starter packer for $ 169, which will include a Chromecast Ultra, Destiny 2 and three months of Stadia Pro subscription.
The monthly subscription will only have some old games, other recent titles will have purchased separately. Google will introduce free plan sometime next year with 1080p stream limit.
Games and Hardware Requirement
31 Games have been planned for launch including Destiny 2, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, The Division 2, DOOM and Tombs Raider. It is not clear how many of these games will be included in the subscription, but we will clarify it in this article after the announcement.
Google had stated earlier that any machine capable of running chrome can stream games from Stadia, but that will not be possible for some time. Users will need to Chromecast Pro for Stadia at launch. This will change in 2020 Google will open up Stadia for all machines running Chrome.
Internet requirements have been kept modest, with 10mbps up and 1mbps down being the minimum requirements. For 4K streams, users will require a minimum of 35mbps down.

Thoughts
Stadia's pricing may disappoint some people but given Google's cloud infrastructure, it will not disappoint on the end user experience. Separate game purchases also bummer but that was inevitable. Stadia can reinvent how people play games as this will definitely make gaming more accessible. Although I do not believe this to be a console or PC killer. All these platforms will have their pros and cons and it will depend on the end user's requirement and expectation. Indranil Chowdhury

No comments:

Post a Comment

  DIGITAL LIFE Does New Gmail Feature Pose A Security Risk For 2.5 Billion Android, iPhone Users? Gmail is the world’s biggest free email se...