So for the hell of it, I tried Stadia out on my bottom-of-the-line Surface Book 2, with Destiny 2. Damned if it doesn’t work. I had some mouse issues (apparently that often requires a little configuration), and of course the game is designed for something a little larger than 12.5" or whatever this screen is, but otherwise it all ran perfectly smoothly.
That game list is a killer, though. Destiny 2 (probably not my cup of tea) was free for the deal, but otherwise $10/month, and if I wanted to dig around for something I might prefer it was back to retail prices. My next step will be to see if I could get it to play on a second monitor. If that worked, then you’re basically paying $10/month to have a perpetually top-of-the-line gaming rig, which theoretically is nice when all you can afford is an extremely modest laptop (with a good monitor). So potentially you’re talking about replacing most of the cost of high-end PC gaming, not just console replacement (assuming you have a system already).
I guess when I do the math, I think it probably washes out: in the past I’ve always put together a nice system for about $1200 (monitor is separate), and you typically start falling shy of the top-level games in about 3 years, which is about $10 a month. Down side to the service model is with your own system you also have a nice machine for doing non-gaming activities. Also I’ve often been able to buy a few years with a modest outlay on a few component upgrades.
I’ll have to see if I can try out the NVidia thing as well.
