Each month, subscribers of the Stadia game streaming service with the Pro tier get free games and in June they're getting an additional five.
Games included on June 1 for Stadia Pro will be:
- Get Packed
- Little Nightmares
- Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid
- SUPERHOT
- Panzer Dragoon: Remake
That's the largest amount of games Google has added in a single month to Stadia Pro, which will bring the count up to 17 in total that you get instant access to. You could read into that in a few ways, most likely Google needing to pull in more users and additional games is obviously the best way to do so.
So from June 1, Stadia Pro will have these games:
- Destiny 2: The Collection
- GRID
- Gylt
- PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS
- Serious Sam Collection
- Spitlings
- Stacks on Stacks (on Stacks)
- SteamWorld Dig 2
- Steamworld Heist
- SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech
- The Turing Test
- Zombie Army 4
- Get Packed
- Little Nightmares
- Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid
- SUPERHOT
- Panzer Dragoon: Remake
On top of that, as already announced recently Stadia Pro will also be getting The Elder Scrolls Online on June 16 bumping that list up even more. Google kept telling people not to think of it as the 'Netflix of games' but as Stadia Pro keeps on increasing the game count, it's starting to feel a little more like it.
As a reminder, Stadia will soon drop down from two to one free month of Stadia Pro when you sign up. Do so before June 3 if you want both months free.
Stadia is just the next level of how technology advances. More and more people are getting better and faster Internet connections, if you don't belong to them yet, well... maybe in the future though. Maybe then this is not for you yet.
I'm impressed by Stadia and how well it works. Performance overhead? Maybe that's coming through the fact the game is not running on your local computer, has to be encoded, transmitted and decoded again. I haven't realized any bad performance so far, it works pretty well for me. I'm using FullHD resolution only, as I don't own any 4K device.
Not all games on Stadia are native Linux ports? I doubt it, Doom Eternal sure is, as ID software was mentioning in their tech talk on how they ported Doom 2016 to Stadia. As Metro Exodus shows signs about a native Linux port for the end user, I'm pretty sure that's based on the Stadia Linux port. And didn't Ubitsoft state that it wasn't too difficult to port their portfolio over to Stadia? Even if it's not native, I don't see an issue there, as long as it runs well.
But most engines support Linux nowadays, there are rumors that e.g. Battlefield as a native Linux build, it's just internal and will probably stay this way forever (like the new Doom ports). So it seems really feasible to create those native ports.
Doubting that Stadia will have a positive effect for Linux gamers? Having Vulkan versions of the games on Stadia is very helpful, because even if no native Linux version for end users are released, Proton/Wine will be able to easily run it as they don't have to wrap around any DirectX API. Also more Linux devs are needed, and whenever they switch jobs after finishing a Stadia port, their will want to use their Linux-focused knowledge on other projects. The benefits might not be that straight forward nor obvious, but in the long run I'm sure it will improve things for Linux gamers.
In fact, I just want to play games. Where I play them, I don't mind. Well, that's not completely true, as I want to play them on my Linux PC, but if it's distributed by Steam which can be shut down any time (very unlikely, I know) and I lose all my games there, or on Stadia... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I can't resell my games on any of those platforms, I do need an Internet connection for all of them, even if I'd buy a retail version, I have to activate it online, download day once patches online, etc.
I don't really see a big difference between Steam and Stadia, except the hardware, where the games is rendered. From a non-technical aspect, they seem to have more in common than they differ.
There are even good reasons for Stadia: Devs can develop against a certain piece of hardware, no need for supporting a vast variety of hardware setups. You don't have to deal with cheaters, as they have no access to the files or the machine itself to alter its memory. Both means devs can save a lot of money. Of course that doesn't work for each kind of game, e.g. streaming a VR game is atm not possible. And not being able to mod certain games is something I would miss. I don't think that Stadia would replace PC gaming anytime soon, but I think it's a nice addition, giving people who don't want to spend more money on hardware upgrades than on games the opportunity to play latest AAA titles. It's bringing a new level of convenience, and that's what many people like.
It's how the technology evolved, it does have some concerns to know about, but in fact companies want to earn money, and due to the competition on the market their interest is to deliver a good service, so they can attract and keep the customers. Remember when always-on was a hot discussed topic? No one complains about that any more. Or when DLCs became a thing? No one complains about that any more either. Or even when Valve released Half Life 2, forcing people to use a client to activate and install the game, and look how people now prefer Steam over everything else? Turns out, all these things haven't been that bad. There are exceptions of course, like loot boxes, but here the complains have been heard and they seem to be a thing of the past.
Time goes on, things change. Give new things a chance, if it's not good, people will complain and hopefully give good feedback so it can be improved.
To be fair though, I haven't spend any money on Epic yet, and have not bought any game on Stadia so far, though I do have the pro subscription.
Just Epic (afaik) and GoG are distributing drm-free games, so once you downloaded them, they still work offline.
* itch.io
* Humble Bundle DRM-FREE selections
* IndieGala
* GameJolt
^ All have Linux native DRM-FREE binary games to purchase and/or for free.
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