I agree, but I do think they've been doing a good job lately getting partners to dip their feet in the "cloud-only" functionality Stadia enables. For example:

I agree, but I do think they've been doing a good job lately getting partners to dip their feet in the "cloud-only" functionality Stadia enables. For example: - GRID added a 40-car race mode that's "just not possible on consoles". (Unfortunately there were rarely enough Stadia players playing GRID for matchmaking 40-car races to work well!) - Orcs Must Die 3 added Stadia's "Stream Connect" feature, which is basically like screensharing with people in your party. They also apparently increased horde sizes on Stadia compared to other platforms. - The Hitman series added Stadia's "State Share" feature, which lets players set up scenarios and create customized game states that they can share with others to play. - Dead by Daylight and Baldur's Gate 3 added "Crowd Choice", which lets streamers create polls for in-game choices that automatically selects an outcome based on viewer votes (e.g. choosing whether the streamer is a killer or survivor in DbD) - Outcasters uses Crowd Play which lets stream viewers instantly jump into games with the streamer they're watching - etc There's a lot of cool stuff that can be enabled when the hardware runs on beefy cloud servers. Although it would be cool to see what novel functionality Google's internal studio would have showcased, I also think it's pretty important to focus on getting "real" games and encouraging devs to take advantage of cloud-specific functionality. There's probably something to be said for the Ubisoft+ model (basically a separate, smaller streaming service on top of Stadia/Luna/etc), but I don't think cable-like "channels" bundles are the way to go for streaming of any kind.