Stadia Might Be One of Google’s Best Products—Eventually

Gaming on PC has always been an expensive hobby. Growing up, I used to dream about being able to afford a real gaming computer. Our family PC was running Windows 3.1 well into the heyday of Windows 98. I used to tear pages out of PC Gamer, and even WIRED magazine, and pin them to my wall the same way boys did with sports cars—except my Lamborghini and Ferrari were Falcon Northwest and Alienware. To that young girl, and every other kid like her, Google Stadia would seem like magic. It's a lot easier to sell your parents on $10 a month than it is to convince them that several thousand dollars’ worth of gaming hardware is a worthwhile investment.

Stadia is Google’s first deep foray into the world of gaming. It’s part game console, part streaming service—like Netflix but for videogames. For a single subscription fee of $10, Google promises to stream PC-quality games to practically any device that can run a web browser. That's one hell of a promise. If Google can pull it off, Stadia is positioned to substantially lower the financial barriers to PC and console gaming.

Google is not the first company to design this kind of service. OnLive, PlayStation Now, even Nvidia have tried—and mostly failed. The difference here is what I like to call the Apple phenomenon. Apple didn't invent the MP3 player, but it sanded off all the edges and made a really good MP3 player. That's what Google aims to do here for streaming games.

If Google has its way, PC and console gaming are about to become more accessible to millions of users, and that’s an incredible feat no matter how you slice it. But as always, there's a catch.

The promise of Stadia is that you can play your games anywhere. You could do it right now, on your work or school laptop, just as easily as you'd sign into Gmail. The service lets you stream games over the internet like you might watch a YouTube video—no downloading required, no pesky updates.

You don’t really need to buy anything, either. You just need a Stadia subscription and a compatible device. You can play on a TV with a Google Chromecast Ultra attached, a Google Pixel phone, any computer with a Google Chrome browser. That means, essentially, that you decide how much you want to invest in the Stadia ecosystem.