And of course, they primarily focused this argument on supposedly low sales of Crysis, a game that EA announced had sold over a million copies a little over a month later. It's possible that those were copies sold to retailers, since these would have been mainly physical copies at a time when many were starting to transition to online distribution, as the game didn't come to Steam until the following year, but it seems like worldwide sales for the game were likely decent enough.
Plus, the game had abnormally high system requirements, and wouldn't run all that smoothly even on high-end hardware of the day, which likely impacted initial sales. In some ways, Crytek was probably treating the game as a tech demo to show off what their game engine could do for future titles, hoping to license it to other studios. Even if initial sales might not have been as great as some console games, the game undoubtedly sold well in the years that followed, as Crysis became something of a de facto benchmark to measure PC hardware performance by.
As for Unreal Tournament III, many simply considered it to not be quite as good as prior installments in the series, or at least to not do enough new to justify buying another rendition of the game. And while it wasn't nearly as graphically demanding as Crysis, it was a lot more demanding than prior installments, which for a competitive shooter could turn many away.
Back to this article, I'll just quote what I wrote about game streaming in another thread yesterday...
...As for Stadia, it's yet another game streaming service, which have been around for years, and have never really caught on, and in some cases have gone out of business, leaving their customers without their games, or even save files. The biggest issues with streaming games tend to be latency and image quality, which can both be pretty poor relative to playing games natively. Maybe google can do better than the other companies that have failed in the past, due their large number of server locations and resources, but I wouldn't count on the experience being as good as playing games on even a lower-end gaming PC. Unless you live right near an urban center where they have servers, expect input lag to be poor. Also expect 1080p gaming to probably look more like 720p in motion.
Game streaming will likely become more common as internet connections improve, but I don't see PC gamers jumping ship en masse for game streaming anytime soon. If anything, it seems like console or smartphone gamers would be more prone to trying game streaming services.
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