My dad doesn't read this blog. He barely uses email beyond forwarding me chain letters about phone scams, three years after they stopped being relevant. But it's Father's Day today, and I spent most of the afternoon at his place half-watching golf with him and half-scrolling through the E3 wreckage on my phone, which felt like a weirdly fitting way to spend it.
If you missed it, E3 wrapped up Thursday. The whole internet has been running the Keanu Reeves "you're breathtaking" clip from the Xbox briefing into the ground since Sunday night, and I'm not going to add to that pile - my group chat alone has sent it to me eleven times this week, I counted. What I actually want to talk about is something that got buried under all the meme energy: Google's pricing for Stadia.
Stadia Connect happened back on the 6th, and then the whole thing got a second wind during E3 week because everyone was already primed to talk about game streaming. Here's the deal as Google's laid it out: Stadia Pro is $9.99 a month, the service launches in November, and if you want in on day one there's a Founder's Edition bundle for $129.99 that gets you the controller (which is $69.99 on its own), three months of Pro, and a Chromecast Ultra. Fine so far. Except then you find out you're still buying most of the actual games at full retail price on top of that subscription. Destiny 2 is being tossed in free-ish as a launch perk, sure, but that's the exception, not the model.
I don't get it. I pay for Xbox Game Pass right now - $9.99 a month, same number, funnily enough - and that gets me access to a rotating library of actual games, no streaming required, no extra purchase. Stadia's pitch is "no console needed, just click a link and play," which is a genuinely cool trick technically. I watched the Doom Eternal demo footage from the show floor and the input lag looked basically nonexistent, which is impressive given it's rendering on a server somewhere and pushing pixels to your screen in real time. But cool tech and a good deal are two different things, and right now Stadia is asking me to pay a subscription fee for the privilege of also paying full price for games I could just play locally if I owned a console I already have sitting under the TV.
My dad, for what it's worth, thinks all of this is insane regardless of the pricing structure. His entire framework for video games stopped updating somewhere around the Atari 2600 he still has in a box in the garage - I've offered to hook it up for him twice now and he keeps declining, which bugs me more than it should. He asked me today why anyone needs their games to live "in the cloud" instead of on a disc they can hold, and honestly I didn't have a great answer beyond "the industry has decided this is the future, so here we are." That's not a defense of Stadia so much as an admission that a lot of this stuff gets decided by companies before anyone asks whether people actually want it.
The other thing nagging at me is data caps. I've got a decent connection at home, but Comcast still caps me at 1.2TB a month, and streaming 4K game footage for hours is going to chew through that fast if Stadia becomes a habit rather than a novelty. Nobody in any of the E3 coverage I read this week mentioned that part. Everyone's excited about latency numbers and resolution and none of them live somewhere with a data cap breathing down their neck, apparently.
Elden Ring got a teaser this week too, the FromSoftware and George R.R. Martin collaboration, and that's the one piece of E3 news I'm actually unambiguously happy about, mostly because it means nothing except "more Soulsborne, eventually, from the people who are good at it." No pricing model to be skeptical of yet. No subscription tier. Just a logo and a promise, which after a week like this felt almost restful.
Anyway. Dad's asleep in his recliner now with the golf still on, and I should probably head home before traffic gets bad on the 405.