"Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

I think it would be helpful to broaden your horizons a bit. Everyone is talking about Stadia; whether it will be good or not, whether it will eventually see long-term success. These are very boring questions. The more interesting question is whether cloud gaming will see success over the long term.

Every major player, minus Nintendo, is entering or already in this market. Most notably, Microsoft is releasing xCloud very soon, and PSNow already exists. You can go play God of War, a PS4 game, on your PC, literally today (unfortunately, no Mac support yet). Its $10/month. No one talks about this!

Realistically, the cloud gaming market will become a utility, just like the cloud itself. Who can provide the most datacenters as close as possible to large customer bases? Who's technology provides the best user experience? Who is available on the most screens? These are all questions that multiple major players can have great answers to. Stadia was "early" (though, Playstation was the earliest, and its not even close; they purchased Gaikai in 2012 and OnLive in 2015, they're so far ahead that Google wasn't even thinking about this when Sony was actually selling it). But a player being early means nothing if this thing that Stadia released today is in the state that its in; they need years to iterate on it.

So, what will differentiate? The Games! This is the Hard Problem in this space. Not networking. Not DC locations. Games!

The choice isn't just "do I want to play RDR2 for super cheap with decent quality on Stadia, or in great quality but a $500 upfront fee on my X1X". There's a third choice there: Should I play it on PSNow? xCloud?

And, realistically, yeah its a very fluid market. I could play on any of them. But Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are destroying the third-party AAA game development space. Their first party studios are insanely good, seeing billions in investment and new acquisitions. They have proprietary world-class technology that they only share internally (example: the Decima engine used in Horizon: Zero Dawn was used for Death Stranding, and is widely considered to be among the most technically advanced engines in the world right now (though, Kojima isn't an SIE Studio, so maybe its a bad example)). Point being: if I pay for Game Pass on Xbox, and I'm a big fan of their exclusives, then RDR3 comes out and I can play it on xCloud, I'm going to buy that on Xbox. There's gravity to these platforms, and that gravity comes from the titles where I have to go to xCloud to play.

Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, has the most measured and strongest position in cloud gaming. At E3, he said that he sees it as just one avenue where people will play games. In some situations, it makes sense. For some people, it makes sense (though, those people like you will never play games as much as people who have consoles/gaming PCs). So, they will build it. They have the technology and DC footprint. But, Stadia's downfall will be in their all-in approach, combined with their lack of revenue strategy and lack of first-party exclusives to build gravity.

> it's not clear what Stadia brings to the table that NVIDIA can't do better

The price

Sure Nvidia GeForce Now is free right now, but that's because they test the market. They can't afford this forever. There's many service that tried this in the past with Nvidia Grid, for a pretty high price, and they all went away (OnLive, LiquidSky).

The latency for a few people involved did actually exceed a second.

The problem is you need the latency for the nearest Google DC with graphic cards in servers which might not be your nearest Google DC at all. And Google probably fucked up other things too, considering the amount of fail in thsi product.

> It will be the most enjoyable option too

I think it depends on the standards you judge it by. If lack of installation is the standard, then sure. If image quality is the standard, at least with this iteration of Stadia, it seems so far like you'd get better results with any modern console and significantly better results with a PC.

For Stadia to take off, it's going to need to penetrate the existing gaming market to at least some degree. I don't think it can survive solely off people who haven't played any game in 10+ years but suddenly want to play the most complex AAA games like RDR2 (which was a bit hard to figure out in its entirety even for me as a seasoned gamer). These games aren't Candy Crush; the soccer mom crowd isn't going to be buying here. And for that penetration into existing markets to happen, it can't perform noticeably worse in all ways than consoles.

I (EU) played regularly with someone in Australia on R6:S and it wasn't much of a problem. He's used to latency issues so he played as well as anyone else would.