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Very good insights! And great point about the future plans of Sony/MS. I strongly believe their next "Consoles" will be a side-product of their cloud implementation. The consoles will still be there because of course lots of people will need them, but the software platforms will have a cloud-first design. Google was 5-8 years too early with Stadia, but they took that approach directly. Edit: but they are now years ahead of Sony and MS in terms of having a true cloud-gaming platform... not simply console units sitting behind Azure servers, which do NOTHING new for gaming. Stadia is capable of providing new unique gaming experiences, if they had the chance to do so. MS is now working on exactly this with Sega (I think of it as XCloud 2.0), I could see Sony doing it more internally. Working at AWS, any insight you can share into how Luna operates? Do the games simply run within AWS, or on something "behind" AWS? Looking forward to it being available in Canada. As for the subscription vs purchase models of gaming... I feel it still holds parallels to the Movie industry. Hollywood movies are like AAA games, and producing them just to release them on streaming platforms doesn't make sense. We saw how the movie industry struggled with theaters shut down due to Covid for 2 years. I feel it's the same with AAA games for quite some time to come. MS is stealing mindshare and the love of gamers by throwing everything they own into GamePass, but can that fund all AAA games going forward? Sony seems to feel it can't, and I would agree with them. Those Day-1 $60 unit sales are still way too important to give up.

That comes down to the game I guess and how sensitive you are to such things. Perhaps why cloud gaming tries to grab the non-gamer audience who don't even know the difference between 30fps, 60fps, native 4K vs upscaled 4K, etc. I fit somewhere in the middle... I know the difference I just don't usually care. I chose to play plenty of games at 30fps while 60fps is an option, or play Elden Ring on PS4 at 30fps just fine, even remote play to my phone. Forgot to mention in my OP the biggest reason I latched onto Cloud Gaming so strongly is because for all the years I owned a PS4 I greatly played it remotely through my Vita and later my phone. So cloud gaming was a natural evolution for me, not the other way around.

Yah that's been the general consensus of the GFN camp as of lately. 3080 came around but the games are just not there to justify it. It's been the slow part of the year the past few months so perhaps it's just a matter of timing and the fall/winter season will deliver the goods. As for GFN I'm very happy I don't live in Europe... they seem to have a rough go with the service in general. Not enough supply for their demand. In my quiet corner of Canada even Free tier gets the job done most days.

This indeed continues to be a problem, depending on the bitrate used by a given service. Stadia maintains a frustratingly low bitrate by choice, so it still happens. But I never know if it would be a problem that wouldn't exist on a console, my TV doesn't handle HDR very well which usually eliminates "banding" or whatever you call it, but introduces other problems that are not worth the trade-off. I recall having these problems in games like FF7 Remake on my PS4, so I can't completely blame it on game streaming. GFN at higher bitrates I don't think this would be a concern most of the time.

Yes, the 4K thing was a hot topic. Basically Google set the expectation that "every" game would run native 4K. Stadia does have somewhere between 50-100 titles that do run at true native 4K (current count appears to be 92 titles), which would be on par with any console at the time. To me it was perfectly reasonable that highest fidelity games would not be native 4K... even recent gen consoles can't push everything to the max at native 4K60fps, there are always trade-offs somewhere, and there always will be. As for that extra lag in Doom Eternal, they fixed their environment and tested again, with much improvement. More latency than console? Sure, but no longer to a measurable degree for controller play. It all came down to his network, as it would with anyone. Cloud gaming does require a perfect internet connection. Not available to everyone. Personally I would not have used Stadia exclusively for 2 years if I could feel any latency. But I also don't play with mouse/kb. If that is what you want to do, pay for 3080 tier of GFN which can get you 120fps... and it feels perfectly native to high fps PC gameplay. Also keep in mind even these videos are over 2 years old. Tiny improvements have continued over time that have added up.

Very true. I pay more than that for my 1GB up/down fiber connection in Canada. But I was doing that long before Cloud Gaming was a thing. For many it's an option, but for many more it simply isn't. I remember a lot of talk about 5G being the saving grace for cloud gaming... 5G came around and changed nothing, basically. Or the expansion of 5G got stalled by chip shortages? not sure. It seriously fell off peoples lips pretty fast it seemed.

It's definitely not time, I think that's the main point. Stadia with a chromecast device on a good connection is as good as a console. Latency is on par with a previous gen console (too many people compare it to PC gaming which is on another level entirely, or new consoles at 120fps), and the picture quality can be just as good as a last gen console. But it's game by game on that front. Nobody ever needed to pay $10 per month to access the games they buy on Stadia. Ever. That was a complete messaging fail on Google's part. They were too desperate to get the Pro subs that they didn't want you to know you actually didn't need it...

So, it's been a minute. Since I stumbled back into D1P out of the blue I figured I'd check if any folks here are secretly into cloud gaming? I started by doing a quick search for "Stadia", "XCloud" and "GeForceNow" related topic titles. It's interesting that Stadia had the most hits, with the biggest news stories related to Stadia hitting the forum. (It's never positive news of course.) Brief mentions of XCloud, and no hits at all for GeForce Now or GFN. Luna had 2 mentions, when the service was announced, and when the Avatar game was announced. So... clearly nobody here is publicly into cloud gaming. Or perhaps some are using it but just don't feel the need to discuss it, or do so elsewhere. Personally I've been living on the Stadia subreddit for the past 2.5 years. So do you have interest in cloud gaming? Are you curious how it's been going for those of us that are into cloud gaming? As someone who has been pretty much only following cloud gaming related gaming news for over 2 years, and 90% using cloud gaming for my video gaming needs for nearly 2 full years, feel free to ask questions. So I used Stadia almost exclusively for the first 2 years the service was live. I didn't even see the Google keynote where they announced Stadia... so I didn't have that initial hype, but most importantly I didn't get on the crazy train of the wild expectations that Google set for the product. They literally tried to make it a direct competitor with Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. That was their first mistake, and one that others (such as Amazon Luna) was able to watch and learn from. Their second mistake was pitching it as a super powerful gaming platform. Perhaps Stadia does have the power under the hood they gave the teraflops! numbers for... but if it does, I'd say that a very large portion of that power is reserved for the streaming/compression, with the remainder applied to the actual game rendering (probably similar to how all XCloud Series X blades actually render at Series S power). This is just my personal speculation as to why Stadia was far "less powerful" to the gamer's eyes than previously advertised. It's basically on par with a PS4Pro or Xbox Series X. Their third mistake (of many, but last one I'll dig deep into) was how they launched their service model. For the first 6 months or so, you couldn't even use Stadia unless you activated Stadia Pro (basically like PS Plus) with a CreditCard. Your first 1 or 3 months were free (depending how and when you came on board), but you still needed that CC number entered. Much like a lot of sub based services today mind you... this was nothing new... but what was different was that this was necessary just to access the store and buy games. And the "buy games" was the part that really conflicted with people. They wanted Stadia to be a Netflix model where you pay a sub and play what you want like GamePass. That's simply not what Google was going for, and it could have worked just fine if you could just browse the store freely, buy a game, and play it without being forced into activating Stadia Pro for a free month... but they were stubborn and it was their undoing. They have made improvements to this over time (just recently you can browse the store without a Pro sub activated or any Stadia account at all), but it was way too little way too late. The first year of Stadia was an exciting time. Lots of flack from the general press (who mostly tested it for the first time from their office networks...), and it was the butt of every joke... but for those of us using the service, who saw how well it works... the sky was the limit. For myself, it was a serious upgrade from my base PS4. I could run many games at 60fps that was not available on PS4 such as Destiny and Division 2. Not to mention my first dive into 4K gaming (that's another controversy I could have wrote a paragraph about). With Pro I was getting 3-5 free games per month that were mostly fun and interesting. Some AAA sprinkled in, but mostly solid indie and A-AA level titles. Ubisoft was all in on Stadia from the beginning (they helped Google design it afterall during "Project Stream"), so their new titles were arriving day and date... with some older ones arriving every few months. Other titles like DOOM Eternal ran beautifully near 4K/60fps. And the the absolute peak of Stadia's success, when much of the media was actually jumping on board and speaking very positively about Stadia was the Cyberpunk launch... while the game was crashing every few minutes on PC, completely unplayable on Base PS4/XBO, and not much better on PS4Pro/XBOX, it ran BEAUTIFULLY on Stadia... it never crashed. It ran smooth. It looked amazing. It was "the best place to play Cyberpunk". As a Stadia fanboy, it was an absolutely amazing time. People were jumping in, the community was growing rapidly, buzz was positive, DigitalFoundry was all about Stadia doing comparisons and being blown away by the tech... the future was bright. All of that came crashing down 2-3 months later. This of course was when Phil Spencer announced the closing of their internal gaming studio. That's when all interest in Stadia basically died. What we didn't know at the time, was that by the peak of Stadia's success with the Cyberpunk launch they had a goal of 1 million active users by end of 2020... they only achieved about 750k... missing their own minimum target by a whopping 25%. This is when Google concluded that Stadia had failed as a product, and now it was time to shift gears and salvage everything they had invested into that infrastructure and platform. They canceled plans to fund games coming to Stadia, they stopped paying 3rd parties to port their games over, they stopped funding their own game development, they stopped investing in Stadia as a service. Instead they would try to salvage the groundwork and produce white-label cloud gaming product that they could sell to other parties. Stadia would still exist on the side, and reap some benefits from this product development, but through 2021 to today not much has happened. Google still had outstanding contracts for games coming to the service throughout 2021 even into 2022 that they would have paid for back in 2020... but they are pretty much done by now I sense. Any games that come to Stadia now do so on their own accord, to a userbase of less than 1 million where it is unlikely to see any return on the expensive process of porting games into the Platform (another topic that could have been a paragraph or two). Today if a game decides to join Stadia Pro, they will get a % of all the Pro revenue. If a player subs to Stadia Pro as a direct result of playing their game, they get the $10 from that first month signup. Google also takes a much smaller cut than 30% of full game sales on Stadia which they started from. I didn't even mention the Stadia hardware... completely optional, but there were kits with a ChromeCastUltra and a Stadia controller which comes in multiple colors. They were all produced in 2019. Nobody has a kit produced any time after that. So they probably produced them like they do other Google hardware products, a batch of a couple million to start. Today those kits are about sold out after being dropped from their $150 starting point down to $22 during their 2-year anniversary. They also gave plenty of those kits away for free during Cyberpunk and Resident Evil 8 launch... buy the game, get a free Premier kit. The controller is fantastic. To this day the most comfortable controller I ever felt. Other than overly clicky buttons, it is far more comfortable than any Playstation, Xbox, or Nintendo controller I ever held. With built-in wifi it was the best way to connect to Stadia, but any controller got the job done. I used my DS4 with Stadia perhaps 30% of the time, no real difference. If the Stadia controller had proper bluetooth to connect to other devices, it would be a niche item for general gaming. I held out hope for Stadia during all of 2021... until the most recent Insider article that was the final nail for me. I still use Stadia of course... I spent over $1k CAD in Stadia games and Pro sub over 2 years. I play Avengers the most on it (mostly solo since there are not many players, but many on my friend list play it), but I'm a try-everything gamer so I don't finish games often. I play something for 5-10-15 hours and move on. So it's similar spending I would have done in that amount of time on any other platform such as PS4 or Switch. But now when a new game comes out, if it even comes to Stadia at all which feels basically impossible at this point, I would likely not buy it there first. My most recent full purchases were Elden Ring on PS4 and Pokemon Legends on Switch. But I still play Stadia more than those platforms. The Pro games the past few months were still interesting and fun, with good variety. Stadia of course is not the only name in the game... I've tried XCloud many times but sadly on Bell Canada it does not function properly. When that is fixed I can see myself subbing to gamepass ultimate to stream games. But I'm going to wait until they have an AndroidTV app before I really start using it. I use GeForceNow time to time, and recently paid a month to play Genshin Impact (available in Canada only on the service). I was never a PC gamer at heart so I don't care to invest in PC ecosystem. I have tones of free games I claim from Epic every week, but honestly I don't find many of them interesting. GFN has lots of the big F2P games out there, but those are not my jam either. Luna is not available in Canada. Would love to try it, but they are taking a much more humble approach... they clearly learned from Google's mistakes and are taking it very slow. The launch of the new hardware gen definitely took all the wind out of Cloud Gaming sales for the next several years. Cloud Gaming is just kinda there at the moment... there are streamers who have been focused on cloud gaming the past couple years but they are mostly dried up and throwing in the towel as of late. The past couple months has really seen the small but active cloud gaming community simply fall silent and go back to traditional gaming. Many people jumped into Cloud Gaming who were not really into gaming previously, those people perhaps just fell back out of gaming entirely, or they are still lingering. For me, Stadia is just another gaming platform next to my PS4 and Switch. I do not want to buy a new console any time soon... that was the dream of Cloud Gaming for me... no more expensive hardware. I'm still holding to that plan especially while the hot new Playstation games are still arriving on PS4 anyways... that should last another year or so I'm thinking. So yah, figured I'd drop a short note and share my last 2+ years of gaming experience. Anyone else follow a similar path?