There's so much that this will hurt in the gaming industry. Some of my thoughts:
1. As subscription services take over, the upfront revenue game studios see will drop. This is just simple math: Xbox Game Pass costs $10/month, which means its the total cost of a AAA game over 6 months. In a traditional model, many gamers would expect to buy, lets say, 2 AAA games per year. In this new model, I can play as many as I want. And even if I only play 1 or 2 every year, I'm almost definitely going to be "dabbling" in the collection for other games I may want to play, ESPECIALLY if they're instant-on like Stadia. Even if they pay-out to studios based on some metric derived from time spent in game, there's no way studios will get the same level of income as they did before. (note: this is exactly why Spotify is having such a hard time, and why they're branching out beyond music. royalties abstracted behind a subscription service suck for the bottom line)
2. So upfront revenue drops. How do studios make that up? In-game transactions. They're already huge, and they'll just keep getting bigger.
3. So what, micro transactions (mtx) are the "new normal". Well, the top 5% of games can afford that decreased upfront revenue by making it up in mtx (think: Fortnite, Apex Legends, CoD). The trailing 95% can't (think: Indie titles).
4. Beyond that, you can bet your bottom dollar that Stadia will pay out tons to the AAA studios just to get their names on the platform, given that Google has no first party studios to speak of. Assassins Creed gets enough upfront revenue to make it worth their while, meanwhile the next indie darling is left out to dry, further balkanizing the gaming industry
5. Switching gears: A massive number of software engineers in the industry entered it because of gaming. Games, even back in the 90s, were such a clear application and value of computers that it was obvious, even to children, that they'd be something huge. It inspired a generation, to not only play, but to mod and even make their own. Now, we're moving that all off into the cloud, hidden from the next generation. Google wants you to own a Chromebook and consume their products, not understand how they work.
6. Speaking of modding: Its literally the source of the world's most popular games. Battle Royale? You can trace its roots back to mods for ARMA and Minecraft. MOBA? Dota, a mod for warcraft. Creativity happens in environments that large corporations can't recreate, and traditionally a great platform has been starting with a base game, a great game, that some studio created, then exerting your creativity on top of that platform. It benefited everyone, including large AAA studios who could then copy your idea and make millions. Yeah, good luck modding on a blackboxed server a hundred miles away.
7. But fine. I guess we're moving into the future and this is part of it. Except, there are millions, even BILLIONS, of people around the world without the internet capability to even join this service. Google tried to help solve this with Fiber, and gave up. Its fucking hard. They'd rather do easy, cool things, like cloud gaming. Modern consoles are bad enough; my brother, who lives just an hour outside of a top 10 US city, recently told me that he downloaded Fortnite on Xbox for the kids. It took a week of 24/7 downloading. Most games drop with day 1 patches in the dozens of gigabytes, even if you buy the disk in-stores. The sheer arrogance of Google, to get up on stage and claim this service is gaming for EVERYONE, the apex of accessibility, is disgusting to me. They're stuck so far up their own ass they've become the ouroboros.
8. Well, streaming games have taken over the world. Let's say you want to compete with Google on this streaming game front. All of the top three cloud providers now want to get into game streaming. So, no way can you compete on cost there with them; they own the data centers and give their game streaming divisions nice fat discounts. They all have the pockets to design nice custom silicon with AMD specialized for the task. And, oh by the way, all the latest games are now optimized for this silicon (whether its the custom AMD chips in the PS4, or XB1, or whatever cloud streaming service we're talking about, they're all custom). You're stuck with off-the-shelf cards. Ha! Nvidia won't let you deploy their cards in a datacenter [1], because they ALSO want in on this big cash pile they've all convinced themselves exist. So, basically, good luck. The world has balkanized, and penetrating it becomes harder every year.
I hate this. I hate it so much. The only saving grace is that it is inevitable that this will fail to realize the results Google wants, and they'll pull the plug. And maybe the rest of the industry is smart enough to recognize how short-sighted a streaming-first/subscription-first strategy is, for literally everyone involved except the people who rent the metal.
I want to go back to the 2000s. This new world sucks.
[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/239994/nvidia-forbids-geforce-dr...