if you own a gaming pc and a smart phone?
Ubisoft sells you a cross buy license
Boom now you own the game on both platforms. It supports cloud saving through Ubi account or whatever
Play at home and on the go
Are you guys lacking imagination here?
Yeah, this would basically be the only way right now. If the publisher provided the license to, say, the GoG, Steam, etc version of the game when you bought it on Stadia. This would be a pretty unusual concept, though. It's the equivalent of if someone bought Red Dead Redemption 2 for Xbox One X and then asked if Microsoft lets them download it on their PS4 Pro, or "I bought Madden Mobile on the App store, how do I download it on Xbox One?"
But with Stadia, I think most people explaining the service are being intentionally cautious and mentioning the pitfalls because a lot of people don't understand game streaming. Even before today, you've had nearly hundreds ofpeople replying "What? It's
not $10/mo and every game is free...?" Like, there's a major disconnect between people's expectation of what game streaming is.
Unless Google and like... Steam could come to a license sharing agreement, it'll likely come down to the publisher if they ever did this. And then theyd have to be careful when they allow it or not, because let's say that Stadia has a sale for some game for $10, if Ubi provides a license for, say, Playstation, Xbox, or Steam, that game may be priced differently on there, so there's a lot of moving parts.
Also, I'd imagine that Google is negotiating the licenses with publishers. Similar to how license rights vary for all digital media, games are no different. Google could negotiate a lower sales price for Stadia games from publishers, theoretically, because it's "just streaming," similar to how license rights are negotiated with movie studios for movies, or music, on streaming services. So even with something like Google Play Music, if you "Download for Offline Use," it's not quite the same as having the rights to those media files outside of Google Play Music. The license that Google has to have, say, The Beatles appear in GOogle Play Music is for streaming, it doesn't allow people to download the music and play it outside of Google Play Music or do what they want with it (short of someone, like, rooting their device to get aorund this).
