Not worth it, I see it as a gimmick at this time. For one you don't actually own the games with a monthly subscription service. If you buy games digitally on the platform you still don't really own them, you are just paying for a cloud platform to host them (same as a majority of digital content). If the platform goes away in a few years so do your purchases.

Also, digital games on the primary platforms (XBOX, Sony, Nintnedo) typically cost more then what you can find a physical version of the game for. Buying used physical versions of games won't be an option either. For example Red Dead Redemption 2 is coming to Google Stadia...for $60. The game has been out on PS4 and XBOX for a year and you can get a new physical copy for $30 or less.

A cloud gaming platform is also dependent on your internet connection. If your connection speed varies throughout the day, or if theres an outage then no gaming. Even if you have a good internet connection you may not have enough bandwidth if theres multiple other people in the house using the internet at the same time. Suddenly the 4k game is down sampled to 1080p or 720p.

Finally the user community on Google Stadia is going to be barely a fraction of what Xbox and Playstation have. If your kids want to play games with friends that won't be an option.

Personally I would recommend picking up a Playstation 4 pro around Black Friday for $350 or so, maybe a bit more if theres a good bundle.

Yeah good point. I think MS has built in pretty good parental controls to disable a variety of things.

Really enjoyed watching Giant Bomb's video on Google Stadia, have been following them for 10 years and trust their opinion.

"It feels like I'm playing on a bad TV", "It looks really good on a phone screen", "Different then multiplayer lag but it's there", "It feels off", "It's not slow, it just occasionally doesn't feel as responsive as I need it to be".

https://www.giantbomb.com/shows/google-stadia/2970-19770/free-video?autoplay=1

On a side note, you can "buy" Mortal Kombat on Google Stadia for $60 and you don't technically own it, just the rights to play it. The game is also available in physical form on Amazon.com for the PS4 for $31...

Sadly the image being streamed isn't true 4K. Apparently the pro 4K stream of Destiny 2 comes through at 1080P, is equivalent to medium graphics settings on a PC, and is then just upscaled to 4K.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/18/20970297/google-stadia-review-gaming-streaming-cloud-price-specs-features-chrome-pixel

"Initially, Google told us that it was using the highest-resolution, highest-fidelity build of Destiny 2 available. But Bungie later confirmed that our eyes weren’t deceiving us. “When streaming at 4K, we render at a native 1080p and then upsample and apply a variety of techniques to increase the overall quality of effect,” a Bungie rep said, adding that D2 runs at the PC equivalent of medium settings. That explains why the Xbox One X build, which runs at a native 4K and with higher-res assets, looks so much better than Stadia."

There was once a cloud gaming platform called Google Stadia...the end.
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This makes the Google Stadia look like even more of a rip off. $200 for an XBOX One S with Jedi Fallen Order + a $40 gift card. Google Stadia is $130 and comes with no games unless you want to pay $10 a month to play a version of Destiny 2 with heavy downsampling lol.

https://slickdeals.net/f/13644607-xbox-one-s-1-tb-star-wars-jedi-fallen-order-bundle-199-98-plus-40-target-gc-free?src=frontpage

The power of the cloud failed lol. Turns out a lot of people are not into "buying" games on a cloud service that you don't actually own and then having to rely on a stable internet connection between ones home, ISP, and cloud gaming provider. Local storage for the win!

What did the high end PC to say to the cloud gaming provider taking over everything? Not today! lol.

There will always be a demand for non cloud based gaming (which makes up close to 100% of the gaming market today). Cloud gaming is not going to take over when internet connections are still often unstable, and there's reliability issues between ISP and cloud gaming providers. If cloud gaming is so great why did Stadia fail? Enough said. No matter how good cloud gaming becomes it will never offer as good of an experience as running the game locally on a high end PC or console such as the Series X and PS5.

Also, have you seen how well the PC hardware market is doing? The PC gaming market is doing extremely well. That's not going away. You can have a game pass type service, as with Microsoft's, and still download, install, and run the game locally.

Whatever happens local storage for gaming, whether it be console or PC, will always be here and offer the best experience. Cloud gaming will always have to deal with internet reliability issues and most of all latency. Latency has been the ultimate killer against cloud gaming as many games, especially FPS's, demand low latency. As far as streaming games to iPad's that's cool as it only gets more people into games. However, there will always be those gamers that prefer the best experience possible and that will continue to be on a high end PC / console with a high end display playing games stored locally.

I think you are really underestimating just how large the PC and console market is. Good enough has never cut it for that market. Nvidia for example has a market cap of over $300 billion. Yes they have a cloud gaming offering but probably 95%+ of the their profits comes from PC and console hardware. Also, local gaming on a high end PC offers far more benefits then 7 extra frames per second. Not sure where that number came from. My gaming PC is setup to run games at native 4K@120hz, HDR enabled, and play on a Gsync monitor. Please find me a cloud solution that offers something comparable with no latency. There's isn't, not even close, and a "good enough" 1080p@60hz solution certainty doesn't cut it.