Google’s Stadia Could Take Video Games Out of Your Hands
The new streaming service could make owning a video game a thing of the past
Google’s all-streaming vision may be the inevitable future of the video game industry, even if Google’s not the one to do it. However, if Stadia and its future streaming competitors become the norm, it could cause serious harm to the idea of owning a video game and all that comes with it.
In the past, when you bought a video game cartridge or disc, you owned that game. You could dig Super Mario World out of storage, plug it into your old Super Nintendo, and play it right now, even though the hardware platform it plays on is more than 25 years old. Platforms like Steam also let you own the game in that you can download digital copies. If Steam were to go out of business, you might not be able to download a game anymore, but as long as you already have it on your computer, you could keep it as long as you wanted.
The most prominent question with a service like Stadia — aside from whether your internet speed can actually support this — is what happens should the game be removed from the server?
