The future of video games seems to be in streaming and if we approach the dominance question with this in mind then the answer becomes a bit more blurred out as Sony is definitely facing stiffer competition in that realm than with physical consoles. While it's true that Playstation has better first party games, everyone else seems better fitted to offer a gaming library on the go.
Stadia can be played in Chrome, the most widely used browser in the world, and requires a gmail account which is, also, one of the most used email service in the world. Stadia feels like a natural progression of Google services while it feels like we have to get out of our way, a bit, to get PlayStation now to play on our devices as we're required to download an app. Sure, it's a little thing but in this competitive market it's the little things that counts.
The downside of Stadia, currently, is that it's "only" a streaming service - there are no way to download the games and play them on PC, for example, with weaker internet connections.
I've mentioned this before but Xbox Gamepass is, hands down, the best gaming library rental service on the market today as they offer streaming as well as the ability to download games both on Console and PC. They have a foot in today's reality, where not everyone has warmed up to the idea of game streaming, and another foot in the future where streaming is set to become mainstream. I believe the big Xbox executives when they say they don't really care about consoles sales because they're already setup to win the market 10 years from now.
PlayStation is dominating today but I believe they will be the next Blackberry story at least as far as gaming libraries are concerned. It doesn't matter how good your console's sales are if the world has changed in such a way that you don't even need a console anymore.
You'll note that Nintendo wasn't mentioned in this "Sony VS Microsoft VS Stadia" article and the simple reason for this is because they are a bit more difficult to predict. Sony, Google and Microsoft seems to like playing it safe by taking advantages of current, and future, trends while Nintendo is known to be more of a risk taker and, in some cases, end up creating their own trends by taking advantage of something no one else thought about. Nintendo doesn't look like it took any steps towards the future of game streaming but we can't really count them out of it just yet ... they may end up taking everyone by surprise and end up dominating the market.
What ever happens, it sure is an exciting time to be a gamer and I can't wait to see what the next 10 years will look like. Game on, my friends, game on!
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