When you're playing online games, MMOs for example, you still incur the cost of latency to the server, games tend to hide that in various ways. Google servers

When you're playing online games, MMOs for example, you still incur the cost of latency to the server, games tend to hide that in various ways. Google servers are much closer if not in the same datacenter as the game servers... network latency between them is negligible So, (local input -> network delay -> reply / do graphics locally) == (local input -> network delay -> remote processing -> reply with h264 video). As such it's not going to affect things as much as local steam play which also works pretty well on local lan.