 Hold up a second, you guys remember Google Stadia? I mean, it seemed to have just come and go like a fart in the wind. It crops up every now and then, exclusive demos as an example, we played Immortals Phoenix Rising on it and it ran just fine, it ran as you expected. But Google Stadia is making a little bit of hay right now, and it's making a little bit of hay because the people who actually use Google Stadia, which by the way, in case you didn't know, there are actually people who use Google Stadia are reporting that hey, all these issues that people are having with Cyberpunk 2077 on last-gen hardware or even like PlayStation 5 and some lower-spec PCs, not a problem on Stadia. In fact, the game runs better than it does on the Xbox Series X, which is saying something because the game actually runs pretty well on the Xbox Series X, not as well as it runs on like a super high-end PC, but it still runs very, very well. Of the console versions, it is the one that seems to have the best performance, the least amount of bugs and issues. So yeah, Xbox Series X kind of a win for that. But then Stadia comes along. You don't have to spend $500 on a system. You do have to spend 60 bucks in a game. But the game just works and you can play it on your PC, on your TV, if you have the correct sort of device to stream it to your TV. It can run on your phone, obviously computer monitors, laptops, anything. 1080p, close to max settings, ray tracing on, no problem. Even higher resolutions, depending on your internet connection. This is interesting to me because all we've heard since Google Stadia's pricing announcements is we should be rejecting Google Stadia. Google Stadia is garbage. Google Stadia doesn't work as well as they say it does. Google Stadia's pricing model is stupid. It should be a subscription service. They shouldn't be charging full price AAA. Things for games that you lose access to if Google Stadia goes away. After all, Google has the ability to push one button and just delete Google Stadia. Google has a history, a notorious history of getting rid of products like that. I mean, maybe one of the most well known ones in the YouTube sphere might be something called Google Plus. Remember that, gone. So, Google has a history of starting up these really interesting ideas, never really seeing them to their full potential, and then dropping it. But here's the thing with Google Stadia. While it's a running joke in the industry, at least among gamers, that who plays on Google Stadia. It turns out quite a few people are actually playing on Google Stadia. Quite a few people are actually enjoying their time playing on Google Stadia. Some even saying they're playing Cyberpunk 2077 just fine over 4G LTE on their phones when they're at a coffee shop. Which, should they be at a coffee shop doing that in the middle of a pandemic? I guess a personal choice that they've made. But still. It looks like Google Stadia is turning out to be an extremely viable gaming platform. What I find interesting about this is Google Stadia is not alone in the streaming space. We know about xCloud coming, which has been highly touted as having a very, very successful beta on Android. We've heard, obviously we got GeForce Now is out there as a streaming service. Granted, it's a different type of streaming service. It's sort of like Google Stadia, but different because you buy the games on like Steam or GoTool games or whatever. And then you can stream it through GeForce Now so you can take advantage of a more powerful system. There is a bit of a downfall to it. One, obviously we know a lot of publishers have been pulling their games away from GeForce Now, even though GeForce Now never thought they needed permission to do this in the first place. Because hello, the consumers bought the copy of the game. They can't use GeForce Now. It's like me buying Cyberpunk 2077 from a PC, but then installing it on my friend's PC and then always playing it on my friend's PC. What's it matter? I still bought the game. That was GeForce Now's argument, but from a legal perspective that wasn't the case. And they've lost a lot of developer support. But the downfall of GeForce Now is that while you could get super high end performance of games, it might even be the best alternative out there from, you know, beyond spending $3,000 plus dollars to build a sick gaming PC with a 3090 and a 5950X and all the best RAM and bells and whistles. Sometimes there's a cue. For Cyberpunk, in particular, there is a cue. It can take up to an hour at times before you're able to play the game, because they give you access through streaming to what amounts to a fully decked out specced top of the line PC. So they only have so many of those in their farm, so they kind of have to, you know, wait for people to stop playing before they can let other people in on those particular PCs for a game such as Cyberpunk. So it is a downfall of GeForce Now. But it is technically a streaming competitor, albeit a different one because you don't buy the games directly from them. Obviously Amazon Luna, we all know like that's a product coming out. I'm in the beta for that. Might do some thoughts on that eventually here. And these are all competitive products. It seems that Luna for sure we know is a subscription model. There's the base subscription and then you can subscribe to like different companies or whatever. Like Ubisoft is going to be on there and under a different subscription. A very interesting way to deliver this. This almost feels like the cable TV route. You have your base package for cable TV, but then you can add like HBO or stars or like set fees. That seems to be maybe what they're doing here on Amazon Luna. XCloud, the big thing that it has is that it is going to be tied in with Game Pass as well. So like if you're, if you want to stream games on XCloud and you have a Game Pass subscription, if those games are available through to stream, you'll be able to not spend any extra money. So it's already sort of through proxy of Game Pass, a Game subscription service. So kind of like a Netflix of games as it were, quite literally on the streaming side. These are vastly different approaches. So full triple A pricing, streaming, but like cable package style with Amazon, where you can like select different packages and in different companies to add in. Kind of pick and choose your poison and how much you want to spend. You also then have Xbox kind of doing the traditional streaming route and then with Google Stadia doing full game pricing. This is interesting. And it's interesting because for the first time, maybe since Google Stadia came out, I can't sit here and tell you you shouldn't use Google Stadia. I've actually had people on Twitter that follow my channel defending Google Stadia, explaining to me the benefits of them, that they don't have the crazy fast internet I do. For those who don't know, my internet isn't crazy fast. I don't have fiber, but I have really fast internet compared to most people. I have a business line cable internet connection at my house. So I get about 30 up, which isn't that much. Some of you guys would just standard home packages from Comcast or whatever can get better than that. But then I also have 500 to one gig down. It kind of varies throughout the day. It's supposed to be a full gig down, which is close to fiber, but I don't quite, to be honest, I think the highest I've ever seen it at any given point was like 912 down, and that was only for a few seconds. Otherwise, it's usually between 500 and 800 balances around based on the traffic on the network at the time. So that's really fast internet. That's way good enough for any sort of streaming service that exists. So streaming services in terms of speed, not an issue at my house. I have a really nice router, a really nice modem. So it's all good, right? I have great internet in my house now. It's just, it feels weird to talk positively about Stadia. Like it's been kind of the butt of jokes for gamers for a long time, but were we too quick to dismiss Stadia as a viable gaming option? I mean, I've seen arguments from people using it that hey, unlike other Google services, Google won't get rid of Stadia, giving some pretty decent arguments as for why they won't, such as most of the products they've gotten rid of in the past were not paid for services. So they weren't subscription based, and they didn't have, you know, purchases tied into it. Remember, Google probably gets 30% of every cut of every game you buy on the product as well. Google Stadia is an alternative in a field that maybe needs to exist. I love Game Pass on Xbox Series X, right? I'm a huge Game Pass fan. I always thought the key for streaming was going to be subscriptions, kind of like what Amazon Luna is doing. The thing is, some people don't like subscription fees because here's what happens with subscriptions. This happens with Game Pass. Games aren't there forever, right? You, on Game Pass, you can't control what games are added and removed. Same's going to be true on Amazon Luna. You can't control what games are available. On Google Stadia, if the game was ever available on the platform and you bought it, you will always have access to play that game. They don't just remove it from the library and you can't play it anymore because you own a license to play that game. So, is Google Stadia potentially the future? Now, maybe not Google Stadia itself, but a service like that, is streaming really that close to being extremely viable? I mean, if you want to buy Cyberpunk 2077 but don't want to deal with performance issues but also can't get your hand on an Xbox Series, an Xbox Playstation 5, or build a super expensive PC and you have good internet at your house, I mean, I'm talking good like 60 down, 10 up, at least that, get it for Google Stadia. I can't believe I'm actually saying this. You want to play Cyberpunk, buy it for Google Stadia. It's going to outperform pretty much everything. It's going to like best on it unless you have that top tier PC hardware. Obviously, alternatively, don't have great internet, buy it for one of the other platforms. Something you lose in spending that 60 bucks is resale value, but you lose that with digital purchases on any system. So, I think that this is something to consider. I'm not like super passionate about it. I'm not sitting here touting Stadia as, you know, this big future of gaming, but I will say today, surprisingly, at the end of 2020, Google Stadia is a viable gaming platform. One, I can understand why consumers would actually choose to buy for it, even if they own a different platform. And I didn't think I'd be saying that this far in to Google Stadia launching, which by the way, I had some really weird launch where Pro was first last year. You know, I didn't think we'd be at this point. But here we are, Google freaking Stadia. We'll have to see how xCloud and Luna can stack up once they go fully public. All right, folks, I entertain your open chance from Nintendo Prime. Thank you so much for tuning in. Let me know your thoughts on Google Stadia down in the comments. I'm sure we're going to see a lot of people hating on it, but hey, my experiences with it every time I try it have been massively positive. So, I can't even say like from personal experience, I think it's a horrible service because it's been pretty good. I actually have no complaints. I couldn't tell you if I was even latency wise. I couldn't tell you if I was playing locally or not. For all I know, I'm playing on my Series X. It doesn't really, it's good. It's damn good.