Google Stadia's free tier is almost here —but should you even bother?

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Stadia will have a free tier, but what is that going to get you?

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Google's launch of its cloud-gaming service Stadia has been shoddy at best. Now the company is pivoting to a different approach to cloud gaming by making its service available for free. 

If you shell out for Google's Founder's Edition, you'll have to pay $129 on top of a $9.99 subscription fee. The company is now looking to offer a free version.

"The big strategic difference is that over the next few months you will be able to experience Stadia for free," Phil Harrison, vice president and general manager at Google, told Protocol. "No money down, without having to put a box in your home, you can just click and play amazing games straight from our data center."

It's unclear how this free version will work. There may simply be a free tier below the paid subscription that limits you in some way, like reducing your stream quality. Or it's possible Stadia will be completely free, and all you'd need to buy is an optional controller and Chromecast. Of course, you can just as easily game on a Chromebook instead.

However, even with a free version, it's going to be tough to get people on board when Stadia has so few games. At this point, Stadia offers only 42 games, and a number of those aren't even out yet, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Marvel's Avengers. 

Even with promising services like Project xCloud on the horizon, we're still not sold on Google Stadia -- free or not.

Rami Tabari
Rami Tabari
Editor

Rami Tabari is an Editor for Laptop Mag. He reviews every shape and form of a laptop as well as all sorts of cool tech. You can find him sitting at his desk surrounded by a hoarder's dream of laptops, and when he navigates his way out to civilization, you can catch him watching really bad anime or playing some kind of painfully difficult game. He’s the best at every game and he just doesn’t lose. That’s why you’ll occasionally catch his byline attached to the latest Souls-like challenge.