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I tried Stadia and had a wonderful first experience on my Mac. Mac is relevant here because it's still worse for gaming, with access to fewer titles. If the pr

I tried Stadia and had a wonderful first experience on my Mac. Mac is relevant here because it's still worse for gaming, with access to fewer titles. If the product is good, I'll pay for it. With streaming bundling, they can create a solid business.

aylmao 7y ago
> With streaming bundling, they can create a solid business. I do wonder if this would be profitable though. Is Google operating at a profit even with the current model? NOTE: I got way into writing this comment. I have things to do, but I thought I'd do some napkin math instead haha. I'm probably way off, but it's an interesting thought experiment. My guess is it isn't. I'd be surprised if Google is selling the hardware at a profit right now, simply because the volume is not too high and they definitely want to reduce the barrier of entry. On the software side, game companies probably don't want to lose margins and it sounds like right now they have leverage since this is a nascent platform. My guess is they're taking around 70% of the game sale (wild guess from the "digital sales" info in these Ubisoft slides [1]). Let's ignore Stadia Pro for now and just assume the $10 a month go towards the the free games, or the extra compute for the 4k games / surround sound, or the discounts. If we go with $60 as the average price of a game, this napkin math tells us Google is making like $18 per game and that this their main source of revenue. How long is a game? It varies widely, depending on the game (and the player) [4]. Let's say people spend an average of 20 hours on a game though. An hour and a half a day for two weeks. Can Google stream games, HD at 60fps, for less than 90¢ an hour? Of course, this is Google so they're just employing their existing developers infrastructure, etc. The scale probably means they can probably get RTX 2080s in bulk at a discount. It's perfectly plausible they can. Im again, also certainly way off in my numbers. But it is a huge investment— the promise is it could open the doors of an industry for Google, but if it doesn't, is it worth it? To be clear, I'm not calling doom on Stadia just yet— YouTube operated [2] (operates?) without profit and there's still old services that have stuck around. Google Voice still exists in spite of many calling its doom years ago [3]. Just wrote this for the analysis, not really to make a point one way or another. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7x2sp3/ubisioft_retail_game_margins_are_55_vs_70_digital/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7x2sp3/ubisioft_reta... [2]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-for-youtube-1424897967 https://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-f... [3]: https://gizmodo.com/google-voice-is-dying-and-its-beautiful-1632920573 https://gizmodo.com/google-voice-is-dying-and-its-beautiful-... [4]: http://www.gamelengths.com http://www.gamelengths.com

aylmao 7y ago

> With streaming bundling, they can create a solid business. I do wonder if this would be profitable though. Is Google operating at a profit even with the current model? NOTE: I got way into writing this comment. I have things to do, but I thought I'd do some napkin math instead haha. I'm probably way off, but it's an interesting thought experiment. My guess is it isn't. I'd be surprised if Google is selling the hardware at a profit right now, simply because the volume is not too high and they definitely want to reduce the barrier of entry. On the software side, game companies probably don't want to lose margins and it sounds like right now they have leverage since this is a nascent platform. My guess is they're taking around 70% of the game sale (wild guess from the "digital sales" info in these Ubisoft slides [1]). Let's ignore Stadia Pro for now and just assume the $10 a month go towards the the free games, or the extra compute for the 4k games / surround sound, or the discounts. If we go with $60 as the average price of a game, this napkin math tells us Google is making like $18 per game and that this their main source of revenue. How long is a game? It varies widely, depending on the game (and the player) [4]. Let's say people spend an average of 20 hours on a game though. An hour and a half a day for two weeks. Can Google stream games, HD at 60fps, for less than 90¢ an hour? Of course, this is Google so they're just employing their existing developers infrastructure, etc. The scale probably means they can probably get RTX 2080s in bulk at a discount. It's perfectly plausible they can. Im again, also certainly way off in my numbers. But it is a huge investment— the promise is it could open the doors of an industry for Google, but if it doesn't, is it worth it? To be clear, I'm not calling doom on Stadia just yet— YouTube operated [2] (operates?) without profit and there's still old services that have stuck around. Google Voice still exists in spite of many calling its doom years ago [3]. Just wrote this for the analysis, not really to make a point one way or another. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7x2sp3/ubisioft_retail_game_margins_are_55_vs_70_digital/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7x2sp3/ubisioft_reta... [2]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-for-youtube-1424897967 https://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-f... [3]: https://gizmodo.com/google-voice-is-dying-and-its-beautiful-1632920573 https://gizmodo.com/google-voice-is-dying-and-its-beautiful-... [4]: http://www.gamelengths.com http://www.gamelengths.com