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California has issued a statewide order to its 40 million residents to stay at home for the duration of the coronavirus crisis. Nevada has instructed "non-essential" businesses to close for 30 days, sending workers at those businesses home as well. This morning, New York followed suit and sent its non-essential employees home.
What are all these folks supposed to do at home? The lucky ones may still be able to earn a living by working from home. The rest will have to find some other way to occupy their time -- and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) hopes that they'll take up cloud-based gaming.
Google, an Alphabet subsidiary, launched Stadia, its cloud-based "streaming" gaming system, late last year. Last month, as the coronavirus began gaining steam, the company said it would be introducing a free-to-play option called "Stadia Base."
For those willing to pay to play, however, today Google announced it's discounting the cost of its Stadia Premiere Edition package, which includes a Stadia controller, included Chromecast Ultra service, and three months of Stadia Pro, to just $99 (from a retail price of $129) for one day only.
Ostensibly, Google says the price cut is to celebrate the U.S. launch of Bethesda's Doom Eternal game on the Stadia service. But if cutting $30 off the price of Stadia Premiere also happens to have the side effect of introducing more gamers to the Stadia service right at the outset of a perhaps three-month long, coronavirus-enforced, homestay program, I doubt Google would be too upset by that.
Rich Smith
Source: The Motley Fool
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