Google Stadia pricing and initial games lineup announced

Google's new game streaming service, Stadia, finally has a launch date. Come this November, the Stadia Founder's Edition will start shipping. The Founder's Edition, currently priced at 129EUR, comes with a cool looking Night Blue controller and a Chromecast Ultra (shown above). On top of that, the package comes with 3 months of Stadia Pro for you and a friend.

Stadia Pro is a subscription service (9.99EUR/month) which gives access to collection of 'free' games a la Xbox Games with Gold or Playstation Pro. Stadia Pro also allows streaming in hi-res 4k and HDR. The interesting thing is, anybody wanting to play the latest games at release will still need to 'purchase' them at full price in order to play them on Stadia. With all the hype around Stadia being a new way to play games, it comes with a rather traditional business model.

Those who don't want to invest in the Founder's Pack will need to wait until 2020 when Google will start Stadia Basic. A subscription-free service that will allow users to stream any game they've 'purchased' to any computer with Google Chrome.


The launch lineup is surprising enticing, with a few new titles revealed during today's livestream. For example: Baldur's Gate 3 from Larian Studios and Darksiders: Genesis from THQ Nordic. In total, over 30 games were revealed during the event; checkout the full list on Wikipedia.

It remains to be seen what the overall Stadia experience will be like. Reports from pre-release Google Streaming services had a lot of complaints about video quality but mentioned that latency was generally acceptable. And acceptable may be all that it takes for Stadia Basic, with it's zero-dollar initial investment, to take off.

What are your thoughts on Stadia, will it flop like On-Live or is now the time for game streaming to prosper? Leave a comment below.

For more information, or to pre-order, head over to Google's official Stadia page.