Sorry, no new news in this post, just a lot of me daydreaming and speculating.
Anyway.
So, a few things occurred to me the other day:
1: I haven't had a 'bad blade' experience for a log time now. To clarify, a bad blade session is when I started a game and the menus would be fine, but the in-game lag would get worse and worse until it was several seconds of delay. This happened twice in D2 and once in Gylt. Since then I've poured hours into Metro Exodus, Thumper and Borderlands 3 and never experienced the issue again. So that's good.
2: Why are they being so slow with announcing Base, while giving away a 2nd round of buddy passes, and doing deals with BT and Verizon? Are they trying to 'ramp up slowly' so the servers don't get flooded on day1, or so support doesn't get flooded with "Why doesn't this work on my setup" calls? It makes a lot of sense in many ways. Giving Stadia away with broadband packages at least means they know the persons connection will be up to a certain standard, and with buddy passes you kinda assume you'd only give it to a buddy if you knew their internet was ok (not how it worked in reality, but still).
Either way, if they are still hesitant to open up Base, it either means they arent confident in their current infrastructure to support it, or they just aren't desperate to throw the doors open to all the freeloaders to try and get as many users as possible.
3: While I was watching the new coverage of Doom Eternal it occurred to me that Stadia would be great for press demo sessions like this without having to fly journalists around the world and set up expensive gaming PCs. Just assign special game Demos to Journalist accounts, let them know its ready, and voila! Now the press can play the game on a fixed hardware setup, where the only real variable is the monitor and controller (well ok, and their network, but I feel like journalists would quit being dicks about that once it became the norm). They can't give the game to anyone else, and once the demo period is over, it can be removed from their accounts. The game company could even watch the journalists play it (assuming that youtube share feature works) to look for people getting stuck/not having a great time. It could give games companies a lot of control and feedback in controlled demo sessions like this.
(Admittedly, if this was more widely applied beyond curated demo sessions for journalists it becomes a bit scary, but not everything has to be a slippery slope, so here's hoping).
