Update 9:30 PT: here are the full official details…
Google Stadia is arriving with competitive pricing later this year, but 2020 will be the platform’s ultimate test. Details of the service’s pricing and availability were being shared by Google at 9am PT today, but were leaked Thursday morning by Canadian newspaper La Presse, a post which has since been taken down but was translated by Kotaku.
We’ve reached out to Google for confirmation.
Here are the leaked details, prices are given in Canadian dollars fyi:
Google’s game-streaming platform Stadia is reportedly arriving in November and will cost $11.99 Canadian per month. This base subscription get you 4K/60fps streaming, but the big news is that the company will launch a free model in 2020 that will let you play games you purchase through the service at 1080p resolution.
($11.99 Canadian is about US$9, though there’s no guarantee Google will maintain pricing this way across markets.)
To get onboard, the minimum internet connection speed is 10mbps download, so if you’re running any slower than that, tough luck.
The subscription will come with some games for free, but you won’t get everything for $11.99 Canadian; you’ll have to buy most new games à la carte, it sounds like. Popular titles like Doom, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey,The Division 2, Destiny 2 and the Tomb Raider trilogy will be coming to the service.
There’s an individual package called the Stadia Founder’s edition that will retail for $169 Canadian and will include a Chromecast Ultra, Stadia Controller, copy of Destiny 2 and three months of the service.
This is some fairly aggressive pricing for Google; high-resolution game-streaming is a bandwidth-intensive technology that’s extremely expensive. Basically, unless you own the cloud and aren’t stuck with AWS fees, there’s no way you’re going to be able to compete with these prices, so fresh out the gate Google may already have a huge advantage if all of these details hold true when the company shares more details on Stadia this afternoon.