Google plans for the launch of their game streaming service Google Stadia have been revealed, with the service’s price, launch line up and launch date all announced in the first Stadia Connect Stream. The service will be going live in November with 31 games available on day one and a mixed subscription and purchase business model.
Stadia will launch in November, reaching 14 countries, one of which will be the UK. There will be a Founder’s Edition, which includes a special edition Night Blue controller, a Chromecast Ultra, Destiny 2, and two three month subscription – one for you and one for a friend. This costs $129 USD / $169 CAD / £119. Separate controllers will cost $69.99, and you will need a controller and Chromecast Ultra to join the service initially.
A Stadia Pro subscription will cost $9.99 USD / $11.99 CAD / £8.99, and includes streaming up to 4K and access to a growing catalogue of “older” games starting with Destiny 2 and expanding from there, but you’ll need to purchase the latest games outright if you want to play them on day one. A Stadia Base service will come in 2020 where you can simply purchase games outright. A minimum download capacity of 10 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream are required. For 4K with 5.1 surround sound, a speed of 35 Mbps is required.
Games revealed include:
- Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
- Baldur’s Gate 3
- Borderlands 3
- Darksiders Genesis
- Destiny 2
- DOOM
- DOOM Eternal
- Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2
- Farming Simulator 19
- Final Fantasy XV
- Football Manager
- Get Packed
- GRID
- GYLT
- Just Dance
- Metro Exodus
- Mortal Kombat 11
- NBA 2K
- Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid
- Rage 2
- Rise of the Tomb Raider
- Samurai Shodown
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- The Crew 2
- The Elder Scrolls Online
- Thumper
- Tomb Raider Definitive Edition
- Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint
- Tom Clancy’s The Division 2
- Trials Rising
- Wolfenstein: Youngblood
Of these, only GYLT is an exclusive title.
Announced at a special event in March, Google Stadia is the search giant’s first meaningful crack at non-mobile gaming. Their intention is to build a completely hardware agnostic gaming platform that can be accessed almost instantly from almost any device with a screen, whether it’s a TV, mobile phone, tablet, or computer. They’ve designed a dedicated Stadia controller that connects not to the device you’re looking at, but directly to Google’s servers via your Wi-Fi connection.
Stadia will launch games within five seconds, running at up to 4K at 60fps and with HDR and surround sound support, with plans for that to scale up to 8K resolutions in the not too distant future. Powering this are server farms with 10.7 teraflops of GPU processing power, and while that’s more than both PS4 Pro and Xbox One X put together, it’s in the ballpark of where we expect the next generation of PlayStation and Xbox to be.
Unfortunately for Google, Canadian website Lapresse.ca decided embargoes are not to be followed and has published all the details of Google Stadia ahead of the the official reveal at 5pm tonight. All the information leaked turned out to be correct, funnily enough.
MrYd
So how much is that controller going to be then? If it’s £97 for the “Founder’s edition”, minus £21 for the subscription (3 months at £7/month) and a Chromecast Ultra is £69…
That’ll be £7 for the controller then. Although I suspect it’ll be a lot more and Google have enough money to sell that bundle for a big loss.
31 games at launch and only some included in that £7 a month though? Compared to “over 100” for £7.99 with XBox game pass, or “over 600” for £7.09 a month with PS Now (based on the yearly price, or £12.99 if you want to pay monthly)
MrYd
Actually, about £5 a month for PS Now with the Days of Play sale starting tomorrow (assuming Euro prices get converted properly)
Dominic Leighton
Yeah value-wise it’s just not there, though arguably your initial outlay for a PS4 or Xbox One is a chunk more.
The service will have to expand quite considerably to make any part of it worthwhile though. I guess it’ll roll out to some modern TV sets and that might be the real starting point for it.
MrYd
Some TVs have Chromecast built in, although I’m not sure if they can do 4K or not.
And the initial outlay for a PS4 might be twice as much, but you don’t have to pay £9 a month just to be able to buy games.
MrYd
£119 for the founders edition. And £8.99 a month. Or for the free version, you can buy games individually and play them in 1080p60 with lovely modern stereo sound. But for your £119 you can give it to a friend for 3 months. If you’ve got a friend who like you to give it to them.
And you need a Chromecast Ultra to play on a TV, not any other Chromecast or a TV with it built in.
But they do say you can use a PC from day one. Or a phone (Google Pixel phones only though). But I guess that’s only with the founder’s edition? Slightly confusing.
Nate
If this works well, it is potentially revolutionary. Roll on November!
KippDynamite
This doesn’t appeal to me in the slightest as I like to own things rather than rent them. However, I’ve subscribed to Netflix for about ten years so clearly there’s a way to reach stubborn, stingy people like me. When Netflix started, it was like $4 to rent a DVD for one day from Blockbuster. Netflix was about $8 per month and they had something like 50,000 titles to choose from. It was just a drastically different alternative that had undeniable value. Additionally, an old movie is as appealing as it ever was if it’s good, whereas good games lose much more appeal as time goes on.
Stadia specs and prices seem on par with the competition, but it seems much faster to connect. However, it has about 5% of the games of their biggest competitor, and only one exclusive. When it comes to picking a console, exclusives are a big deal, but perhaps the ease of use will draw in people anyway.
Andrewww
Ok, I pretty much hate Google, to be honest, so I’m critical of everything they do. But this looks much worse than what I expected of them in gaming. They seem to ignore everything that makes the streaming model so appealing. If they don’t step up their game considerably, it’ll just be adding another entry to their already long closed down services list in about 2 years.