Stadia is set to take the world by storm in November when it launches, though how well it may actually do remains to be seen. One of the questions that many people still seem to have is how much games will actually cost. While Google did announce the prices of the service as well as the hardware needed to play games on Stadia, it hand’t mentioned any prices for games. It still hasn’t, but Stadia Lead Phil Harrison has recently said “I don’t know why they’d be cheaper” when asked about whether they would be less expensive than games on consoles or PC.
This means that Stadia subscribers can expect to pay about $60 for a new game. There are of course some variables here. $60 is the standard price for a new game in the US, and only if the game is generally a fairly new title. So, games on Stadia are likely to be $60 if they’re still around that same price on other platforms. When those prices fluctuate or if they’re already less than $60, Stadia’s offerings of the same games will be around the same cost.
This should be no surprise to anyone that plays games. Steam, Green Man Gaming, PlayStation, Xbox, the Epic Games Store, and any other platform for buying games physical or digital are all usually around the same cost when they first launch and well into their first year. Eventually you do end up finding some deals tough.
Amazon is a good example of this as you can find some price discounts on specific games if you buy the physical copy, where the digital copies tend to stay at retail, whether that’s $60, $50, or $40. Players can expect a range of prices for games on Stadia as not all of them are going to be extremely new titles.
While some, such as Borderlands 3, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, and Watchdogs: Legion are all games yet to launch, others like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey are a bit older and have already been around for at least a year, so it wouldn’t be a surprise to see games like this one come out at a bit less, so long as the price is matching what it costs on other platforms.
One mustn’t forget that pricing is also subject to change. The cloud gaming industry is very new and as the market changes, the technology will too and so will the pricing, most likely. So while prices for games may be the same now on Stadia as they are on other platforms, that could change in the future if Stadia changes up the way it offers cloud gaming.
Whether or not players agree with the pricing that Google has set for games on the Stadia platform, Harrison has reportedly justified the cost being at a market matched price even though the games are only available via a stream as opposed to owning a digital copy, highlighting that a big reason is because the games can be played via multiple pieces of hardware from laptops to desktops to TVs to smartphones.