When Google officially announced Stadia and then more recently announced the pricing and release date for the platform alongside announcements of launch titles, it’s safe to say there was a fair bit of excitement for the product. According to a recent study of gamers in Europe that excitement seems to be pretty low though, suggesting that gamers in the countries where the study was completed care more about traditional gaming platforms such as console and PC.
Things to keep in mind in regards to this study are the countries which were included, which is nowhere near every country in Europe, and there’s no mention of exactly how many people were surveyed for the study; only percentages are given and these percentages only pertain to those that were surveyed.
According to the survey, which included gamers from the UK, Spain, France, and Germany, only 15-percent of the participants are excited about Google’s Stadia service launching this Fall. That seems like a pretty small number, especially when you consider that only 12-percent of the gamers that were surveyed aren’t sure if they’re excited or not. The remaining number of people surveyed could care less, it seems.
To be more clear, that 15-percent are excited for some kind of Netflix-style streaming service, not necessarily Stadia, but there’s little doubt that Stadia is included. Of that 15-percent, 3-percent were considered to be very interested in giving a service like Stadia a shot, and the highest number of people that did show excitement are from the UK.
This poses some interesting challenges for Stadia and service like it, such as X-cloud or NVIDIA’s GeForce NOW, the former of which is not yet available while the latter is only available in beta and as such is still free for those that were allowed to participate.
One key thing not to forget is that all of these are relatively different in their own right. Both Stadia and GeForce NOW offer a connection to virtual PCs to play, while games are available mostly as single title purchases. Services like PlayStation Now on the other hand are a flat fee a month and all games in the library which is upwards of 750 are available to play and stream at no additional charge beyond the monthly fee.
One big reason that cloud gaming or game streaming services might be less popular in Europe could be due to packaged games being the preferred method for buying new game titles. According to the survey 31-percent of gamers said they prefer to buy physical copies of games as opposed to the ability to buy new digital copies and stream those game titles. Some also wonder about whether or not services like Stadia would be a good value for the cost.
These are sentiments that gamers in general seem to be echoing. Though Stadia might garner the most excitement from places like the US, there are still people in the US who share some of the same worries about service value and preferences for owning physical copies of games, or at the very least digital copies on more established platforms like consoles and PC. As services like Stadia launch and become more available, it’ll be able to fill in some of the gaps in the consumer market where gamers may not have access to other gaming hardware.