Google is bad and getting worse by the year for privacy abuses. Stadia is lame. Less Google in your life is a good thing.

Get a real console, or better yet, get a nice video card for your PC and Steamlink and stream PC games to your TV. That's the ultimate solution.

If you just want to play games, an XBOX with Gamepass is the way to go. Constant stream of A and AAA games that are months to a year old plus indie games and it's DIRT CHEAP if you manage promotions. They had one with Rockstar energy drink that worked out to like $4 a month. So for less than the price of a single physical game you could have access to non-stop A to AAA level games all year. Destroys Apple Arcade and Stadia isn't even in the same conversation.

In fact, Gamepass has been SO strong, Sony will have to address it soon (their initial attempt was sad) or they will lose the next console generation to Microsoft.

It kills me to say it because I'm generally a PlayStation guy, but for your circumstance, an XBOX 1X ($300-$350ish) with Gamepass Ultimate ($14.99/mo retail, as little as $4/mo with promos) is likely the best way to go. You'll have non-stop top level games and if you watch the promotions, it'll be dirt cheap

The promos come and go. In the case of the recent rockstar one (some walmarts may still have the promo cans with Gears of War on them), you got a code that you could add to your account that would extend the gamepass by months at a time. Some people bought enough cans (@$1-$1.50/ea) to extend their membership for a couple years at the super cheap rate.

Just sign up at slickdeals.net and set a deal alert for "gamepass" and they'll send you an email any time there's a deal for it posted.

Nintendo is terrible for online and saving data. SOMEONE needs to slap some sense into their Japanese network dev team. They're at least a decade behind Sony and Microsoft. We have all the systems, but Nintendo is SO BACKWARDS with online and cloud stuff. For that reason alone, unless the kids are really young, I wouldn't recommend a switch to a one console person.

They initially tried to change the terms of the promotion after people started buying lots of RS and pouring out the drink just to get the codes, but there was such an outcry, they changed it back and made it just a little more annoying to redeem. Still a great deal.

XBOX 1X (not the 1 or 1S) with Gamepass is the best solution for your situation. Lots of great games, cheap all year long, with new ones every month.

Nintendo first party games (i.e. The good ones. in general, there's lots of shovelware from 3rd parties) rarely go on sale, so not a great value. And the age of the kid was so he/she won't remember/care that their saves were lost or trapped on a console because of Nintendo's stupid network/cloud code.

Like I said, I'm probably Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft in general, but Microsoft has come on strong, and Gamepass is a ridiculously undeniable value with the promotions that give you a year of it for about the price of ONE physical game. I have no problem recommending it these days.

And it's Google. Crappy, ever-more-abusive Google. Google could invent the best phone in human history tomorrow and be giving it away and I wouldn't take it. Once you realize that YOU are the product with Google, Facebook, Oculus, Instagram, etc it is bad news. Unfortunately Google started out pretty great, but they've become corrupt and are probably worse than Facebook, we just don't have the details yet.

I just was casually aware of how they are handling Animal Crossing, but I was hearing some really bad things like you could only have one town per Switch or something dumb like that, meaning no multiplayer where you visit each other's towns. I don't remember exactly, only that I was not happy about it. They better not screw this up.

Life lesson. Better to get them sooner than later.

Pay the $100 extra for the 1X. Visually there's a pretty significant difference in the way games look on it.

And I checked on the gamepass ultimate thing. The main promo is still going on. As long as you have gold, you should be able to convert it to gold with gamepass ultimate for a buck. So I'd recommend getting 3 years of gold at once and then converting so you have 3 years of free games for what works out to like $5/month. Here's the details on how to do it:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/18/18684136/xbox-game-pass-ultimate-convert-xbox-live-gold-36-months-how-to

But I'd do it sooner rather than later because I don't know how long this very sweet promo will last.

Stadia never had a chance. Totally blows and it's Google. Lose-lose.

My advice is not to let your kids play with the headset for online play. It's a cool feature, but XBOXLive is a cesspool of racist, sexist and generally really bad language. Private room? Headset ok. Public as most are? Nope.

Yeah, the problem is most parents are oblivious. They'd be shocked (or maybe not?) if they knew the indoctrination their kids were getting in the headsets while playing XBOX.

Yep. That's the way it went in our house. Kids weren't allowed to use the headsets unless in a private room with friends. And for games that route the voice chat activity to the TV, voice off.

Well, the day after the terrible launch, Google cancelled almost 1/4 of the 20 or so developer projects in the pipeline for Stadia. That's not a good sign. More cancellations are sure to follow. What a mess of a platform.

Cheap gamepass and XBOXONE for the win.

WSJ reviewer had 3000ms lag at times. Ridiculous for essentially console-quality visuals.

Google is now giving no-questions-asked full refunds on Stadia hardware. The returned units are not being refurbished, they are being destroyed.

Unofficially, that means it's over. Is this the fastest cradle to grave for a Google product ever?

You won't see it in print yet that I know of. Call them and ask for a refund and RMA. You'll get it, no questions asked.

This is a general policy change, not related to the 15 day window from what I was told.

Also, Stadia is causing Chromecast overheating, triggering shutdowns. Not sure if that's a hardware version issue or all of them, but another demerit for the service.

It was DOA. Just slowly bleeding out...slowly, slowly...

Nah. Gamepass type services are absolutely the future. Reliable and relatively inexpensive. Microsoft is killing it on that front - it's a great experience.

Stadia was just a poor contender. Never had the support it needed from developers because they all knew Google would likely do THIS. I have no idea why Phil Harrison is wasting his life at Google. He did great stuff at Sony. Not so, Google. Too much inertia, and no one takes them seriously for gaming in the developer community.

Stadia failed because it was a bad product with bad support from a company with a history of cutting product abruptly, that's it.

High end PC gaming is nice, but it's too expensive for the mass market, simple as that. Console gaming has achieved the "good enough" level that satisfies the majority of the active gaming public.

Gamepass is incredibly stable and a great value if you're a gamer, and once you try its cloud gaming, your need to "buy" games decreases dramatically. Plus the streaming future will let you play games on many devices. My son plays XBOX on TV, but my wife and daughter stream their XBOX games to their ipads and play with an xbox controller. Works great.

So yeah, cloud gaming is just taking off now that we have a real contender in Gamepass showing it can be done well, but it IS the future. The only question is how long will it take to dominate. For console, I don't think it will even be another decade since it already has 25 million subscribers in the short time its been around. Stadia topped out at only about 10% or less of that - it bombed.

Of course. But the number of gamers that are into PC gaming with the best hardware for their 7 extra frames per second on their shooters is small relative to the market. Most of the market will adopt cloud gaming because it's convenient, cheap and portable. That will only grow are network connections continue to improve. It's the VHS/Beta thing. Is PC Gaming awesome with great (expensive) hardware? Absolutely. Is relatively inexpensive cloud console gaming good enough? Yes.

In the market, "good enough" almost always wins.

And 70% or more of that high-end PC hardware is (well, WAS) going to crypto miners, not gaming. Let's be clear about that. The crypto implosion has created massive problems for Nvidia crashing their stock this year (still way down) and showing how reliant they were on that non-gaming market for their crazy gaming graphics card earnings every year, and backing them up with mountains of unsold GPU hardware. Nvidia's solution to clear that unprecedented backlog no one wants is to make things so onerous on partners, their big partner EVGA just QUIT the relationship. No, things are not good in Nvidia town, and it's not because of the small section of their high end card market that goes to gaming.

https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/evga-terminates-partnership-with-nvidia-and-leaves-the-gpu-market-3311980

I was being facetious. Exaggerating the mindset of (mainly) the first person shooter community to obsess over the few extra frames they get by overclocking a bit more or changing their bus latency or whatever hoops they choose to go through to have bragging rights.

There doesn't have to be. The mass market doesn't KNOW what Gsync is, and definitely doesn't care. Is Gsync great? Absolutely. But like shingles, the mass market doesn't care.

Literally, "good enough" ALMOST ALWAYS WINS the mass market. Beta vs VHS, Wired headphones vs Bluetooth Headphones, etc, etc. It's not an uncommon phenomenon.

Cloud gaming isn't for you right now. But you're not the market for it.

(And just to be clear, I'm not endorsing Stadia's approach to cloud gaming - it SUCKED which is why they're dead. I'm talking the kind of thing Microsoft is doing with Gamepass)

This Aint For You.gif