With fresh new about Google Stadia having been teased this week, ahead of a planned reveal livestream from Google, gamers and the tech industry at large have been eagerly digging for more information about the new cloud gaming service from Google. And it looks like some really important details have been leaked about Stadia.
According to Canadian outlet La Presse, Google Stadia will offer games in a few different modes, with even a free tier included. The listing has now been removed from their site, but the details have been cribbed by various sources.
According to these leaks, Stadia will operate primarily as a subscription service, offering both a free and paid tier which will operate as a cloud-driven competitor to services like Playstation Now from Sony. The free tier grants access to a limited portion of the Stadia library and will support 1080P streaming at 60 FPS. The paid tier will allegedly cost $11.99 and will offer a similar library to the free version, but will support up to 4K resolutions.
The other way gamers can get games on Google Stadia is an a la carte option. You can pick and choose which games you want to own, and just buy those outright, with them apparently working natively with the game streaming platform. It will be very interesting to see how this cloud-based adaptation handles having to stream for potentially millions of customers. I have to wonder how Google will handle scaling such an ambitious operation.
There are said to be more than 30 games being included in the free tier of Stadia at launch. Some games available at launch include Doom Eternal, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, The Division 2, Destiny 2, and the Tomb Raider trilogy. However we can expect that many of these titles, along with the unknown first-party titles released by Google, will be exclusive to the paid tier of the service.
There was set release date revealed, but we now know that Stadia is coming this November. And as part of the launch event, Google is releasing a hardware bundle for $169 that will allow gamers to jump right in. It’s called Google Stadia Founder’s Edition, and will include a Chromecast Ultra dongle supporting 4K streaming, a Google Stadia controller, a 3-month subscription and a copy of Destiny 2. Keep in mind that prices listed are expressed in CAD, so convert for your local equivalent.
The livestream reveal of Google Stadia, including price data and the release date, is set to take place later today, so we’ll see how accurate these leaks are.
