This announcement has made me put my plans on getting a new gaming computer on hold. IF I can play new AAA games and resource hungry strategy games on my old computers via Stadia I see no reason to get a new computer or upgrade my current one since it manages just fine as a regular computer.
And if the above becomes true then Stadia will become a much much bigger threat to Steam than Epic ever can be.
Steam is the number one PC Store in the world. And Valve has been looking into Streaming tech as well.
Playstation Store is the biggest console store in the world and already is the market leader in Game Streaming.
Google owns the biggest Mobile store in the world (Play Store). Set to release Stadia in the Fall.
In the future, if either Sony or Valve feels like Stadia is amassing staying presence and growing substantially in the minds of many...both can easily prevent or reduce that by ramping up their own existing Streaming solutions or composing one and introduce it to their gigantic respective userbases and literally watch it get consumed by the numbers and catch up to Stadia. At least, in Valve's case, this could happen if Valve feels like they are losing mindshare of the high-end distribution to Google Stadia.
And Stadia is
already at a grand disadvantage with PS Now not only having vast chunk of the Streaming market, but by also having a vast library of video game content. To add to that, the service itself is very profitable. Showing signs of staying power and growing thanks to it being attached to the Playstation brand and being the first Streaming service out.
People underestimate the impact of game libraries.
Both Sony and Valve have multi-millions of users locked up to their ecosystem majorly because of their video game libraries.
I doubt Google Stadia is going to have the dominance or power to sway people to their platform's ecosystem if they don't have the competitive software content, be it exclusive or multiplatform, to have Stadia stand out compared to its competition.