In many ways, it’s almost too good to be true. You’ll find the hottest new AAA games from Microsoft Studios, a collection of indie darlings, and even some classics from Xbox’s back catalog. The core strength of Xbox Game Pass streaming is that, for one price, you have a substantial library of games to choose from. 9to5Google was given a subscription for review purposes.

Today, Microsoft’s cloud streaming service is only available as part of its Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, retailing for $15 per month. Standing in stark contrast to Stadia, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is truly the Netflix for games, for all the good and bad that description entails. Instead, the job fell to Microsoft, one of the only companies today with both a powerful, global cloud computing infrastructure and a massive library of first-party and third-party video games at its fingertips. Google didn’t want Stadia to be a Netflix for games, and we argued that Stadia was better for it. What everyone in 2019 actually wanted Stadia to be is a so-called “Netflix for games,” where you pay a monthly subscription and gain access to a library of games.Īs a new player in the field, Google was never in a position to offer something like that, especially considering each game had to be specifically ported to Stadia, meaning developers needed to put in the work and would want to be paid accordingly. Searching for Stadia is a short series intended to shine a spotlight on what made Google Stadia special in the wake of its upcoming shutdown and compare those traits against the ever-widening market of cloud gaming subscriptions.įor all of the things that Stadia tried to be - a bold new way to play games, a social platform, and a framework for new ideas in gaming - there’s one moniker that Google actively avoided. Out of all of the current game streaming services, Xbox Game Pass is the one most likely to succeed in all the ways that Stadia failed, but Microsoft still has a lot of catching up to do.

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