And in the US especially, our internet is often so crappy that cloud gaming is barely going to be useful most places, and where it is, there is still enough micro latency to make games feel worse than playing them natively on hardware.

Cloud gaming as an option may be a somewhat useful addition to people’s current gaming setups, but its mostly going to be an addition, not the core way people play games. I have been hearing about the death of video game hardware for 15 years now and yet PS5 is about to break sales records and become one of the best-selling system in history. Video game consoles and PC gaming and mobile gaming are all here to stay.

Microsoft’s own argument for its Activision acquisition, which was blocked on anti-competitive claims in the cloud gaming space, was that cloud gaming was an insignificantly small part of the market, something outside observers agreed with, saying it was pretty goofy that the deal was neutered because of that, for all reasons. Cloud gaming is the other big “future” thing for Xbox, yet I have seen nothing to support the idea that there will be some massive surge in cloud gaming to compete with any other platform any time remotely soon.

Pc xbox game pass