Google Stadia. Cui Bono?

This week has seen the launch of Google's Stadia product. Console gaming online/"In the Cloud", streaming 4k goodness direct to your TV without the need for that pesky box beneath your telly. That's great isn't it? Well, provided you want to pay the small fee of ￡119 for the minimal hardware consisting of a Chromecast Ultra and a controller, and have an internet connection capable of between 10Mbps and 35 Mbps. For the first few months you get access to the games subscription service, think Xbox live or whatever, and you can still buy games. Or are we buying licenses for games? It not clear to me yet, although I've not delved into it…

 Anyway, this is a great technological leap, right? We can also stream the games directly to our Google Pixel phones! It's awesome, right? 'Cos we all have one of those. Yes, I'm being sarcastic but no doubt this functionality will end up on other brands of phone eventually. I have one question though: Who benefits? In this new gaming world order, why is this a good thing? Who is benefits? Us or them? Which them? The Developers or the Platform creator? Just because we can, should we move in this direction?

 I've been interested in consumer entertainment platforms for years. I've worked in DVD, Blu-ray and media streaming related software providers for the first half my career, and I've seen technology/platforms/the next big thing come and go. As I also crave a little attention once in a while I thought I'd note down my thoughts on this technology for anyone who wants a chat about it.

 Keeping the honest people honest

 Back in the day, I worked for a major electronics manufacturer in a software R&D lab. We had a big involvement in DVD related software and one day during a presentation on DVD technology I remember one of the management saying that the purpose of DVD copy protection was to "Keep the honest people honest". Think about that for a moment. That's saying a number of things:

1. We can't stop piracy so let's keep it to an absolute minimum .
2. Most consumers would pirate something if it were trivially easy (c.f.: Napster. I'm going very turn of the century today!)
3. Conversely, if it's easy to do, even your most law abiding citizen would rip off a media producer if that media costs between ￡10 and ￡20.

 Safe to say that the media and electronics manufacturers have a relatively low opinion of the honesty their everyday consumers. Or at least did back in the '90s. I've not seen the research, assuming there was some, that supports the above, nor that even states the above. I'm making the assumption that their opinion was based upon something more than irrational distrust...

 You don't own that

 Maybe they were right to be concerned as Napster destroyed the music industry. OK, it didn't as you can still buy the latest R.E.M. (90's again!) album on CD but it did lead to fundamental changes in ownership and delivery. Combined with the rise of the Internet we have also seen the rise of audio and video streaming platforms. On some versions of the former you can still buy content, but in the main you pay for a monthly subscription and listen/view all you want. Stop paying and it all vanishes, like a puff of smoke in the cloud. You don't own a thing, just rent access to the content your streaming service has done a deal for. A few times now a film I've been part way through has vanished from my streaming providers of choice without notice. This tells me two things: 1. Nothing is guaranteed, and 2. I really should finish watching films within at least the same month, not stop half way through and come back in a year. I've still no idea how The Lego Batman Movie ends...

 So the upshot is, you don't own it, the film, the music, whatever, or at least a physical copy of it. That makes it much harder to copy it and give it to a friend or be a dodgy bandit and sell it at the local market. Stop subscribing and it's gone, and it can also be pulled from your service at the behest of the license holder, e.g. Marvel films on Netflix. It's not impossible to pirate music and video from streaming services but when the content is available for a reasonable amount, why bother?

For streaming gaming, platforms you have no control over the hardware that the game plays upon nor a physical copy of the game. No point, right? I'm not saying that the game developer would pull the game as you will have paid for it or it's part of your subscription package but if you don't have the hardware upon which the game plays, you can't pirate it. You can't sell it on once you've finished with it. You can't buy it second hand off eBay.

Thus, at a stroke, the game developer and platform provider eliminate piracy and ensure that everyone that wants to play their game must pay for their game. . Sure, you can make an argument that the economics have now changed so that, if everyone pays the games can be cheaper, and, over time, the cost of the game will reduce to get people to buy. I hope that happens but it's a new economic model and who knows what will happen. Piracy aside, streaming gaming is going to lead to a piracy free, second hand free form of gaming. Since I mostly buy games second hand, I don't think I'm going to be better off here. Both the Developers and Manufacturers have been looking for a way to kill off the second hand market for years (c.f.: the Xbox One "loan a game to a friend" PR disaster at the start of the current generation of consoles) and have finally succeeded in producing a model in which they can.

 No more next-gen

 As a consumer, the endless console cycle is frustrating and exciting. Every few years we get a couple of nice, new, graphically rich yet expensive consoles arriving. And something from Nintendo. You have to make a decision what to buy? PS-thingy or Xthing. And the Nintendo thing, which is always worth it as it's different and cheaper. You have to consider which platform will have the best games for you, the franchises you enjoy, reasonably priced online services and backward compatibility. It can be frustrating. I got an Xbox and, to be honest, I've been left disappointed by the games available. I've played a couple games to death, but not much else. It's not been vastly family friendly either, hence the Nintendo Switch.

 With this new paradigm of gaming, it's all going to be about the service. You buy the minimal, "trivially expensive" hardware and, presuming it doesn't wear out or become out-dated, you just need to buy the games you want to play. The cost for someone like me, a casual gamer, becomes much lower. Instead of paying several hundred pounds for the Xbox, I'd just pay ￡120 (or the lower price for the Basic Stadia package when that's available) and the game itself. Yes, the overhead cost per game will reduce the more games you get, that's the same with the current generation, but overall, the costs will be much cheaper. Yay, I win.

 The nature of "cloud" anything is that services on it can, not will, be constantly improved and upgraded. Therefore it would be fair to assume that Google, and competitors will constantly upgrade their streaming gaming platforms on a much more frequent basis that the current console cycle. After all, it's now a software problem, not a hardware problem. They're only constrained by the efficiency of the hardware they run upon.

 Conceivably, us consumers could get the benefits of those improvements for free when we buy a game that utilises them. You'll always be at the cutting edge. Well, up until you're not. You can be sure that, as technology improves the platform provider will find a way of making you pay for new hardware. The new platform will inevitably require new network technology, more powerful video stream decompression to allow for higher resolutions, VR capability, etc.. At least the hardware will be cheaper, right?

 However, a word of warning. Once they turn off the service to the old hardware, you upgrade or you lose it all. Until you upgrade.

 All your bandwidth belong to us

 Back in the day, and I'm now talking late 2000s, the BBC launched iPlayer. It was, in the UK, a smash hit and, at one point accounted for much of the UK's broadband traffic. Netflix also caused a similar situation. The UK Internet Service Providers were in uproar! They complained that their networks were overloaded and the world would end. BBC and Netflix should both subsidise the cost of the traffic.

 Time passed, internet speeds increased, compression technologies improved, Netflix deployed caching technologies in the ISP data centres and the ISPs stopped complaining.

 Streaming based gaming will, in the short term, if the take-up is big enough, cause the same issues and I think we'll see the ISPs complaining again. However, solving this problem will be simpler. Linking the ISP networks directly to the major cloud providers upon which these services are based should resolve much of this. It's an easier fix than it was. The ISPs may well try and charge extra for stream gaming compatible internet packages too. That will prove interesting should it come to pass…

 The Netflix of gaming

 The ultimate goal for all the gaming platform providers is to become "The Netflix of gaming" with associated recurring revenues. They want you to pay, even if you don't play that much. To a great extent they already have done this with their existing streaming services. The advent of the streaming gaming side of the business is the final piece of the puzzle, allowing for instant start of games rather than forcing a lengthy wait as the game downloads locally.

 The same issues that we have with Netflix and Amazon Video today will exist here but there are additional issues. Not only will we have to contend with different games in the service library, we will have to live with games vanishing from those libraries when licenses expire, or Developers and Publishers pull them. Try finding a decent Christmas Film on Amazon Prime Video at Christmas. It's difficult. You have to go and buy it! Some games will never appear in the library and no library will contain everything you want. It's going to be a bit frustrating.

A secondary issue will be the content of the library. How will those games get there? It's an interesting technical challenge. Any game written for the Xbox One or PS4 is designed to run locally. Streaming services will either have to emulate the original platform or have the game converted to their platform. This isn't so bad for Microsoft or Sony as they already have a vast back catalogue of games they can license and intimate knowledge of their platforms. Google doesn't have those things so you have to wonder, especially given the line-up of launch titles, how Google will fill their library? They're clever people and I'm sure will find a way, but they'll have to fund their own exclusives.

Either way, throw away all your game DVDs. They're no good now. Although you could just buy them again when they get converted for your cloud gaming platform of choice.

Ultimately us gamers will benefit from vast libraries of games available on demand but we will suffer when things vanish on demand. Resident Evil 27 is about to launch so you'd like to refresh your memory and play the preceding titles? Oh, they're no longer in the subscription library, you'll have to buy them. Sucks to be you. 

 Cui Bono? Who benefits?

 Well, this is all just my opinion but the mainstream press seem to be focused on the technology, which is impressive to be sure, but no one is making much of the economic and cultural shifts that come with streaming gaming. Yes, there are some benefits to the consumers, especially if you:

• Don't break the law and pirate stuff. (none of us would, so we're all OK with that)
• Buy your games at full price. (Boo!)
• Enjoy a big back catalogue of old games to play.
• Don’t ever want to upgrade your console again.

However, as I think is clear, the chief beneficiaries of this will be the Game Developer and the Platform Provider. I'm not saying the move to streaming gaming is bad or evil, just that the proposition is not stacked in the same way as the previous generation. As consumers we should be aware of that before embracing the new way…