The overall cost of buying into Google’s game streaming platform is becoming clearer, and a lot of it is betting on the future. Google Vice President Phil Harrison had something to say about the state of broadband internet data caps:

“Data caps is not a universal challenge. The ISPs have a strong history of staying ahead of consumer trends.”

“If you look at the trend over time, when music streaming and downloading became very popular, data caps moved up. And then with the evolution of TV and film streaming, data caps moved up. And we expect that that will continue to be the case,”

Harrison would not outright predict data caps being removed from existing offering. As previously calculated by PC Gamer, you would hit 1 Terabyte of download in only 65 hours using the standard 1080p 60fps offering. Considering the ease of use of such a platform, it’s also not impossible to imagine more than one person in the household. But Harrison also says the streaming requirements are not concrete: “There will be some times when actually it’s using significantly less data than that. So it’s not correct to multiply 35 megabits per second times the number of seconds you can play.”

But something will definitely have to give in terms of existing internet plans in places like the United States where data-capped plans are common. Still, other regions such as Europe and Latin America do not generally offer plans with data caps.

Stadia isn’t any cheaper than a console for buying games

Harrison also touched on the idea of pricing changes for Stadia titles. When asked about lower prices by Eurogamer, he says “I don’t know why it would be cheaper,” and that the value is in that “you can play it on any screen in your life – TV, PC, laptop, tablet, phone,”

One of the more immediate criticisms of the streaming model is that you will end up paying full price for a title that only exists on the server of the service and will never be recoverable if the game is taken down for any reason such as copyright issues, account disputes or simply discontinuing the service. But Harrison doesn’t think many gamers would have it any other way: “Not every developer and publisher is ready to move to subscription yet. Frankly, not every gamer is ready to move to subscription yet. So we wanted to give gamers a choice so they could engage in the games they wanted in the way they wanted – and in all cases, without the very high upfront cost of buying a sophisticated device to put under their TV or on their desk.”

Google Stadia launches its early access Founder Edition model for $129.99 in November. That will include three months of the Pro subscription, a custom controller and Chromecast Ultra device for streaming.