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Think of remote gaming as a computer where the connection between the computer itself and its input/output is stretched over the internet. It's bound to remain

Think of remote gaming as a computer where the connection between the computer itself and its input/output is stretched over the internet. It's bound to remain technically inefficient compared to local wires. The goal, of course, is to make game running server shareable between different clients, right? But there already was a service to share your own idling PC with internet players. And unlike Google's servers it can be used to play locally by its owner. But the biggest issue with the whole game streaming is the economy. What's more profitable for publishers and stores, to sell access to games which run on your hardware, or sell the copies of the games and let the players handle hardware cost themselves? The obvious answer leads for remote play services to live off the niche of people who would like to play games but can't afford to invest into hardware. If you compare the cost of a game console with the cost of games you'll understand there can't be a lot of people in this category. TL;DR Remote play is doomed to stay on the fringes due to the economy and physics.

Nextgrid 3y ago
I think greed is a major reason why those services don't take off. From the users' perspective, the only selling point of cloud gaming is that they don't have to buy/maintain/upgrade/carry a large gaming computer. It's not game distribution - which is a solved problem by the various stores and piracy, and into which they're already invested and have existing game libraries. What the users want would be to have a gaming PC in the cloud - same experience as their own gaming PC but without the cost of ownership/maintenance and burden of physically having the machine and moving it. They can install their existing games no matter where they're from (including piracy) - if they work on a local machine, they'd work on this. The problem is that limits the rent-seeking potential considerably; the max price you can charge is about the same as a cloud GPU instance (since that's all it really is), you can't enforce lock-in (the user can trivially migrate to a competitor or back to local gaming - the experience is the same as swapping physical machines) and you can't become a middleman in game distribution.
- viktorcode 3y ago
  > I think greed is a major reason why those services don't take off. Why, they did take off. There are several active remote play services in different countries. As I said, those are serving niche audience and there's no demand for them to grow any further. > What the users want would be to have a gaming PC in the cloud - same experience as their own gaming PC but without the cost of ownership/maintenance and burden of physically having the machine and moving it. I agree, but this is technically unachievable. Local connection will always have more hassle free bandwidth than a remote one. So, what happens in reality, the users trade the cost of their gaming PC ownership/maintenance (which is pretty affordable in case of game consoles) for cost of maintaining high speed and high reliability internet connection.

Nextgrid 3y ago

I think greed is a major reason why those services don't take off. From the users' perspective, the only selling point of cloud gaming is that they don't have to buy/maintain/upgrade/carry a large gaming computer. It's not game distribution - which is a solved problem by the various stores and piracy, and into which they're already invested and have existing game libraries. What the users want would be to have a gaming PC in the cloud - same experience as their own gaming PC but without the cost of ownership/maintenance and burden of physically having the machine and moving it. They can install their existing games no matter where they're from (including piracy) - if they work on a local machine, they'd work on this. The problem is that limits the rent-seeking potential considerably; the max price you can charge is about the same as a cloud GPU instance (since that's all it really is), you can't enforce lock-in (the user can trivially migrate to a competitor or back to local gaming - the experience is the same as swapping physical machines) and you can't become a middleman in game distribution.

viktorcode 3y ago
> I think greed is a major reason why those services don't take off. Why, they did take off. There are several active remote play services in different countries. As I said, those are serving niche audience and there's no demand for them to grow any further. > What the users want would be to have a gaming PC in the cloud - same experience as their own gaming PC but without the cost of ownership/maintenance and burden of physically having the machine and moving it. I agree, but this is technically unachievable. Local connection will always have more hassle free bandwidth than a remote one. So, what happens in reality, the users trade the cost of their gaming PC ownership/maintenance (which is pretty affordable in case of game consoles) for cost of maintaining high speed and high reliability internet connection.