When Google's Stadia video game streaming service arrives this November, it won't come in a box.
Instead, the service is said to run on anything from your smartphone to your television. Stadia will offer the same selection of games, and they'll look nearly identical on whatever platform you're playing on, because the games are powered by hardware in a Google data center somewhere else before being beamed to your screen.
It's like Netflix, kinda, but for video games.
With the base level of Stadia, you pay nothing, but are able to buy games from the Stadia storefront and play them across your devices. With the Pro level of Stadia, you pay $10 per month for what is essentially a PlayStation Plus/Xbox Live Gold-esque service. For that monthly fee, you get monthly games that are yours as long as you keep your subscription. You'll also get a discount on game purchases.
Read more: Google's ambitious attempt to upend the video-game industry and take on Xbox and PlayStation is named 'Stadia.' Here's everything we know so far.
The idea, and the tech, sound interesting, but the promise of a streaming service is paying a single monthly subscription fee for access to a library of content. In the case of Stadia, you're paying the full price of whatever game you want to play, À la carte, and then repeating that with each new game.
Stadia is more like a digital gaming storefront than a Netflix-like streaming service, and that's a shame.