What I gather is: you publish your game and it stays on google servers. There are expected latency issues. But for adventure games, the latency problem is irrelevant…
Also… you don’t own your game. But how many times do you need to replay an adventure game? On the other hand… in 30 years, will you still be able to play that old game? if it’s a masterpiece (think Monkey Island), probably so. Otherwise, probably not.
I’ll give it a big “meh.”
an eye-opening remark 
I think everyone can guess what I think about it…
Just because the technology makes it possible is not a reason I would ever support something like this unless the game is additionally offline playable (or e.g. that it is guaranteed the game is backed up automatically by mirroring it to IA).
Btw, I’d call that a relatively recent development. It wasn’t available when I first played it, nor were a variety of other games that I grabbed on GOG when they became available again (including but not limited to The Dig, Fate of Atlantis, and Day of the Tentacle).
Except potentially to rent a new expensive game for cheap, I just can’t imagine a pricing scheme where this makes any sense to me. Note that the same applies to, e.g., Netflix and Spotify.
And last but not least, it makes preservation of our digital heritage even harder.
Not enough of the world has high enough speed internet to actually make any use of this streaming service. I’m still rocking 365kb/s download speed at its fastest… yes kb
Latency will be too much of an issue
All I think is that the sentiment is cool…
But I’ll stick with owning physical copies of games I love, and downloading all the rest.
about preserving the “heritage” , I think the first instinct is to be too pessimistic. I mean, nobody prevents authors to put their works in the public domain. (today they don’t do it, but this is because they don’t need to… they know their games are already available pirated.)
In other words: for a very old game, either that game is profitable, and then you find it on google stadia; or it is unprofitable, and then the authors will probably put it in the public domain. So you find it in both cases. Too simplistic?
Where are you getting this “probably” from? It completely contradicts everything we know. It’s like saying this piece of meat probably won’t rot if I leave it out on the counter. 
Knowing that your creation is going to disappear forever, you’d probably find a way to keep it immortal. That’s my “probably”.
and what do we know? 
we don’t know anything… today authors know their game is already available pirated, so it doesn’t count what they do today.
we can only appeal to psychology and try to imagine how authors would behave in a world completely unlike what we know today. why would you not put on the public domain something that is unprofitable? Hate for the masses, maybe? Could be…
“those bastards didn’t appreciate my work, I will not give it to them for free”.
or they could be ashamed of their work… not impossible.
or they might not have the rights to put in on public domain… not being the only authors.
I have insufficient prior knowledge to make a reasonable statement regarding what likelihood should be attached to your completely different probability. I’m personally inclined to think that’s fairly likely, at least for a specific category of works.
But do keep in mind how probability works. Assuming we set the chance of an author attempting to preserve their work at 0.8 and their chance of succeeding when trying at 0.6, we still end up at slightly less than 0.5 for any given work actually being preserved.
If your argument is that our prior knowledge somehow no longer applies today, that means we simply cannot know one way or the other. There’s no “probably” to be found there. (Unless you confusingly use “probably” to mean ever so slightly more likely than not.)
I probably shouldn’t have said “probably” :). Anyway, I mean that we don’t have prior knowledge, because today they don’t need to do anything to have their work preserved. we should appeal to psychology…
As amply demonstrated by the tremendous loss of MySpace a couple of days ago.
Right. An author might not have kept a backup of his own work.
I’m not really sold on <everything> as a service. It is a matter of who is in control and in possession of a thing, be it software, a movie or a piece of music. I guess it’s okay if you do not value the individual product that much, and are happy to consume as much as you can gorge down your metaphorical throat, but otherwise it means you will lose access to specific products, sooner or later. To me, that’s not acceptable.
Yep, that’s basically what I mean by not really understanding the Netflix/Spotify value proposition. Let’s say that if I spend € 10 on music for a year I’ll have 12 albums. If I then stop spending money I’ll still have all of that music.
For me, it’d have to be closer to € 10 a year to make sense. Ymmv.
Some people say they rather don’t have physical CDs or records due to the clutter. Maybe, but one might notice I do in fact also buy DRM-free lossless digital music on Bandcamp and Qobuz. And I’ll still have that music decades after those services go bankrupt. (This stands in stark contrast to “buying” a video on iTunes or something.)
But like I also implied, if you can use a monthly subscription to a service like Google Stadia to play some brand-new € 60 game for € 10, the value proposition could be worth it. Borrowing games is nothing new.
It might indeed be cheaper, if you play a lot of (AAA) games; plus you do not need expensive dedicated gaming hardware.
I still would not consider it, because it seems another small step into a future where access to creative products are tightly controlled by a small group of gatekeepers. Our general purpose computers will gradually be transformed into dumb receivers for consuming digital content. And not only we will be at the mercy of the “service” providers, the content creators will be as well.
Also, don’t expect that a single €10 subscription will give you access to all the €60 games you’d like to play as long as there is more than a single gatekeeper!
You don’t have to tell me. But while it would be slightly annoying, you could just use service X one month and service Y another. (In reality people in general probably rarely bother switching around between Netflix and competitors.)
Still, my expensive copy Shadow of the Tomb Raider + season pass[1] actually doesn’t compare too badly to a hypothetical subscription. I played it for 1-2 months, and then every month there’s a new DLC, although I’m currently one or two behind. It seems reasonable to assume similar models would exist on streaming services to tie you in, so then you’re actually looking at € 80-100 to play Shadow of the Tomb Raider the way I’m doing (i.e., spread out over about 8 months in total), which definitely exceeds what I paid for it.
NB Unlike GOG, I basically consider anything on Steam a long-time rental. Basically a better version of Google Stadia but with many of the same fundamental problems.
[1] Expensive for my buying habits, anyway.
