As a consumer and a developer I don't really want Stadia to succeed because of the shift it represents in terms of ownership of media, as well as hack-ability of games. In general I want to have games locally so I can do whatever I want with them.
However, as an industry observer, it's hard to imagine that something like Stadia doesn't have the potential to be a huge success if they really could deliver on promise. With all the people watching people play games on Youtube and Twitch, it's hard to imagine you couldn't convert at least some small percentage of that massive audience into players if the barrier to entry was only a click of a button.
I agree. Right now the focus is on new capabilities this can bring, but if it succeeds it provides an even more invasive way for companies to insert themselves between people and their property. I would argue that the reason stadia is being developed is to further the trend of moving users' files and computation away from their control. Now everything people do in games can be third-party trackable. The computing industry has figured out they can double dip by pushing people into work flows that just happen to trequire a subscription. Expanding this conquest to gaming is happening now because the rationalization is just becoming believable.
However, as an industry observer, it's hard to imagine that something like Stadia doesn't have the potential to be a huge success if they really could deliver on promise. With all the people watching people play games on Youtube and Twitch, it's hard to imagine you couldn't convert at least some small percentage of that massive audience into players if the barrier to entry was only a click of a button.