HN is the only place on the net where I've ever seen people defending the premise of cloud gaming and it's usually (not always) people saying something like "Well I don't game much myself but cloud gaming sounds compelling..."
I think this is why tech companies keep trying to implement cloud gaming and it keeps flopping with consumers. Tech industry people who aren't much of gamers themselves think there is some large untapped market of people who aren't gamers right now but could become gamers if the barrier to entry were lowered. In theory that logic makes sense but in practice that market just doesn't materialize. The barrier to entry for gaming is already quite low, it's a very cheap hobby and almost everybody who really wants to play games has already found a way to do so without cloud gaming.
I do game a good bit, and I like cloud gaming. I find myself away from my gaming desktop often, which makes cloud gaming pretty enticing. And overall it's currently incredibly cheap, a good value.
I get this use case, but I don't think it's very common. Most gamers are near their gaming hardware most of the time. Gamers who travel often usually have some mobile gaming hardware already. The number of people who would game but can't because they travel often and aren't satisfied with existing mobile gaming hardware is minimal. Not zero, but not a huge untapped market either.
Personally, I game almost exclusively on a laptop (even at home.) Suppose I was unsatisfied with gaming on a laptop because only the most powerful gaming PC with graphics turned all the way up will satisfy me... would cloud gaming really be an enticing answer to somebody with such high standards? Sure the 'cloud' server could max out the graphics settings, but latency and compression would probably ruin the experience for somebody with such high standards. Now maybe my issue with laptop gaming isn't the fidelity but instead the hassle of traveling with a laptop. The convenience margin between traveling with a laptop vs an ipad isn't zero, but it's pretty small. I think this is the niche cloud gaming fits into. So cloud gaming is for people who travel often and light, who don't care about fidelity/latency but do care about saving ~1kg of weight in their carry-on bag.
I sold my laptop that was capable of gaming and now I only use geforce now from my macbook. The fidelity is better. The latency isn't noticeable to me in single player games. And then price wise, for the amount I sold my old laptop I'd get 7 years of cloud gaming at current prices, maybe more as gaming is something I dip in and out of, although my kids are also using it at the moment so I can't dip out.
I've never used it while travelling. So I'm definitely a different demographic to the one you're describing.
It's not even that I'm traveling often (as in hotel stay or something equivalent), it's that I'm often out of the house for a bit. Gaps of time where it doesn't make sense to go all the way home to play a game, but enough time to get like a half hour or more of gaming in.
Kids want to go bounce around at the trampoline park? Cool, I'll hop on the wifi there and game. Had to go into the office and am taking a lunch break? Cool, I can hop on the game for an hour. Meeting up with people later but have an hour downtime? Cool, I can go to any cafe or bar and play for a bit instead of heading all the way home.
Just today I was far on the other side of town (over an hour away) as my wife was meeting up with her sister to do some stuff after some big family things. Cool, bring my cheap laptop with me or just use my phone with a controller, I can game for a couple of hours while she does her thing. But then now tonight that exact same game saves are synced to play on my desktop at the house, or on my cheap laptop while on the patio, or wherever. Maybe I'll even spend an hour in the hot tub tonight with the cheap laptop on a towel nearby. Good luck getting that flexible of an experience with a full console or desktop.
And then this even continues to something like the Steam Deck or the other streaming focused handhelds, which I'm now pretty interested in. It doesn't need to have high end gear on it if it's got a decent network connection. And as I've mentioned here, at least where I'm at I'm almost always with some kind of low latency network. It's so ubiquitous around me these days.
> Good luck getting that flexible of an experience with a full console or desktop.
You could stream your gameplay without resorting to Cloud. Steam has (had?) a great service where you could stream your game from one computer to another on the same network.
Admittedly, I'm not in the cloud gaming market nor would I ever be. First, data caps prevent me from doing this. Second, let's say I wanted to stream from some public place. I have to connect to their wifi? Non-starter. Not going to happen. Stream over mobile? Data caps again, this time they charge an arm and a leg and the connection quality is garbage. Third, if I am out of my house I'm probably driving. A Switch, Steam Deck, or Cloud Gaming can't do anything for that.
It turns out I'm no longer a child. I cannot game while out of the house anymore and that's ok. I will never sign up for a cloud gaming service until they can get over the infrastructural issues that prevent adults like me from engaging. For starters that would be public transit, and better Internet infrastructure and services.
I'm happy you found a use case for it. Most of the United States in particular, and I'd wager the world as a whole, does not and will not be in a place where that's viable.
I forgot to address the Steam Home Streaming with my earlier comment, and I did want to bring that up as well. I didn't even think about it, as the smoothness of cloud gaming just completely pushed this capability out of my mind.
Steam Home Streaming works pretty well on a LAN. Quality-wise, with my desktop at home its even higher quality than Xbox Cloud Gaming. I've got many hundreds of hours on my Steam Link. I just wished they'd make it work well outside of the LAN. I've had mixed experiences trying to run it on a few different VPN stacks. I ran into challenges of it not seeing the other computers, the stream being very unstable and crashing, and other issues. Plus, it means I need my computer's local console unlocked at home, but I prefer my computers to get locked automatically. And even then I've had games get in some stuck state launching or closing where I had to manually intervene on the local console to fix it.
Meanwhile, with cloud gaming I just click launch and the game is going. There's no waiting for updates. There's no managing a local console. I don't even need a gaming rig.
Also, you mention "Most of the United States in particular", I am in the United States. This has been my experience in one of the larger metro areas in the US (DFW). I don't get why it would be viable here but nowhere else in the US. 43% of US households have fiber-optic home internet. 60% of households live in areas with 5G coverage. I haven't been on many trips since getting it, but even a few years ago I could manage to sometimes make Steam Home Streaming work from a hotel WiFi on VPN at various places around the country, even with its challenges I mentioned above. I've got family who game a good bit with PlayStation cloud gaming service on a 5G home internet connection.
43% fiber and 60% 5G definitely isn't 100%, I agree. But it does mean there's a pretty big chunk of consumers who can use this, today. I'm not in some magical internet wonderland inhabited by just my family and me. 43% of ~330 million people is >140M people with home fiber internet, nearly 200M people with 5G coverage, today. And that's just ignoring all the consumers with actually decent cable internet connectivity.
> 43% of US households have fiber-optic home internet. 60% of households live in areas with 5G coverage.
I'm doubting both of these numbers. Even if 5G coverage is there, like in my home, it's not a good enough connection to do anything beyond watch the 5G symbol play tag with the LTE symbol.
Even when we live in that world we still live under data caps.
> I'm not in some magical internet wonderland inhabited by just my family and me
And once again that's only FTTH. Loads of coax networks have enough throughput and low enough latency to make it work. Either way, I'm still just pointing out its out there. Fast enough internet is in a lot of places, as mentioned even the WiFi at a few coffee shops and bars around me have had fast enough speeds for a decent quality experience. Which makes sense, as the cable provider in the area offers 300Mbit as a minimum speed for only $65/mo on their business plans with WiFi6 APs. The fiber provider offers like 500Mbit symmetrical for the same on their business tier. Every little shop has at least a few hundred megabits of internet if they need to get their POS terminals online.
Mint Mobile offers "unlimited" (aka throttled after 40GB) for $30/mo without any promotional pricing. Visible offers unlimited for $25 for their basic plan and $35 for their plus plan which includes ultra-wideband and a "premium network experience" whatever that means. From my experiences Xbox Cloud Gaming uses ~1GB/hr. And yeah, within my home or my office building my cellular connectivity is pretty poor. But at the same time both places also have WiFi6/6E APs and gigabit+ fiber connections.
And I'm gonna go ahead and reply to the other comment here so we can re-unify this chain. Apologies for breaking it earlier.
> a child is what enables that behavior
Yeah, in that specific circumstance a child is what enabled that specific instance. And I had the infant at the park because we were all going to the park and had other things to do walking around after that, it didn't make sense for me to just stay at home the whole time. However, you're just ignoring the other instances I've shared. Here's another recent one. A family member was out of town for a while and wanted me to check in and socialize with their cat who gets anxiety without friendly humans around every now and then. So I went over, cleaned up after the cat, hopped on the couch with the cat in my lap, and played games for an hour on their WiFi. No kids involved in that story.
Mobile gaming is a growing market. Its a nearly $60B industry these days. People seem to really enjoy the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck, phones with larger screens continue to get more and more popular. Cloud Gaming can enable these lower power devices to run much more computationally demanding games with similar experiences to game console or gaming PC performance while only consuming a few watts of power. A lot of people are finding time to play games on handheld devices, the real question IMO is if the economics of cloud gaming really work, because for a large chunk of the country all the technology is already there.
> It turns out I'm no longer a child. I cannot game while out of the house anymore and that's ok.
I'm not a child, haven't been one for a long time. I still find time to play games out of the house. You don't need to be a child to play videogames outside of the house.
Just this weekend we went to the park. I drew the straw to watch my infant nap in the stroller while my wife ran off with my older child. An hour of downtime. Turn on the 5G hotspot, whip out the laptop, and I'm on Starfield on my cheap laptop with several hours of battery life.
You're not a child but a child is what enables that behavior. I do not have a child nor am I a child. If I am out of the house I am driving, engaged in an activity, or there socially. When I was a kid I had my gameboy and I'd play it nonstop. Then I started driving and having adult responsibilities and all of a sudden I'm not able to do that.
Then again, I wouldn't have gone to the park to watch my infant while I played games. I could do that at my house.
Same, and I enjoy having maxed out graphics on a large screen while my MacBook stays at ambient temperature, instead of having a noisy space heater howling under my desk.
I think this is why tech companies keep trying to implement cloud gaming and it keeps flopping with consumers. Tech industry people who aren't much of gamers themselves think there is some large untapped market of people who aren't gamers right now but could become gamers if the barrier to entry were lowered. In theory that logic makes sense but in practice that market just doesn't materialize. The barrier to entry for gaming is already quite low, it's a very cheap hobby and almost everybody who really wants to play games has already found a way to do so without cloud gaming.