In August 2009, at the very first Gamescom expo, I sat in a small meeting room in Germany and played Mario Kart and World of Warcraft on a laptop, via technology that was then completely new: cloud gaming. It was a demonstration for a yet-to-be-launched service called Gaikai that promised to let you play any game in a browser window, without a console. (Here is an ancient video of that demonstration, featuring a very young Keza.) With a single click I could launch into any game, hosted on servers hundreds of miles away. It really did look like the future.
Since then, plenty of companies have tried to be the first to truly crack game streaming, vying to be the Netflix of games. Sony ended up buying Gaikai for $380m (£242m) in 2012; its technology now powers the streamable classic games library on PlayStation, and the PS5’s advanced game streaming. OnLive, Gaikai’s first competitor, launched in 2011 but shut down after less than a year, leaving Sony to acquire all its patents. Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service also imploded, launching in 2019 and shutting down three years later.
Despite the fact that people simply don’t seem to want game streaming services – or at least not enough to pay a stand-alone monthly subscription for them – Sony and Microsoft have remained steadfastly committed to the idea, bundling game streaming into their PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass services. I use both quite regularly when I want to check out a game quickly, mostly because modern download sizes are ridiculous (Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, say, takes up nearly 150GB of my PS5 space, almost a quarter of its usable storage). Who wants to do 30 minutes of hard drive management every time they want to play something new?
Last week, however, Microsoft announced that it was introducing time limitsfor game streaming: you’re now allowed 5-15 hours a month, depending on your subscription tier. And yes, you’re right: that is not enough time to play through even one single average-sized game. This brings Microsoft’s previously unwavering commitment to cloud gaming into question – and when even Microsoft with its infinite resources can’t seem to make it work, is the writing on the wall for game streaming as a whole?
In the early days, the biggest problem with streaming was input lag: the time it took for the game to respond to your button-pressing. Normally, when you’re playing a game this lag is imperceptible. Via streaming, it would often be horribly obvious, your character taking maybe a full second to jump after you’d pressed the A button. Not all games rely heavily on timing and finesse, but a lot of them do, and playing games on a minor time-delay felt nauseating.
This is much less of an issue now, but another problem has only gotten worse: game streaming requires the instantaneous transmission of a lot of data, making it taxing on your internet connection and expensive for the service provider. Here’s a comparison: watching an hour of Netflix uses about 1GB of data. An hour of game streaming via Xbox requires about 4GB. Microsoft’s servers have to stream you the video of your live gameplay, and continually receive and interpret your controller inputs. No wonder Microsoft suddenly wants to limit your hours.
The cloud gaming model has always been based on the idea that data infrastructure would become faster and cheaper in the future. Its selling point is outsourcing computing power so that you can play whatever you want without upgrading your console or PC, or even without having one at all. Unfortunately, thanks to AI companies and their chatbots’ bottomless demand for computing power and energy, the opposite has happened. Data and computing power are now more expensive. Ironically, this change has been driven by Microsoft itself as much as anything else: a huge chunk of the company’s spending went on data centres and AI infrastructure in the last fiscal year. This suggests that Microsoft is choosing to prioritise data provision for users of Azure and Copilot over its gaming customers.
Will this affect you? Probably not. Only 4% of all Game Pass subscribers use it for more than 15 hours a month, Microsoft said in a blog post announcing the changes. Which brings us right back to the question: if cloud gaming really is the future, why is nobody using it? It’s been a long time since that 2009 demo, and this technology has still yet to meaningfully break through. Is it time to give up on it?
Alongside Sony and Microsoft, there is one other player left in this death match: the US-based tech firm Nvidia, whose GeForce Now game-streaming service (launched in 2013 and revamped many times since) might just be the world’s most successful. Nvidia has been riding high on the AI boom, becoming the most valuable company in the world. Its computing hardware powers all the datacentres that the rest of the tech industry has been building, to satisfy imagined future AI demand. Perhaps, when all of this shakes out, it will be the only company left that can afford to provide game streaming services at all.
I have been variably unwell for most of the summer, and in need of something absorbing, so I dived into Kingdom Come Deliverance II – think Skyrim, but 15th-century historical fiction.
I was impressed immediately by the outstanding script, story and performances, all of which are much more humorous and entertaining than I was expecting from a hardcore medieval RPG. And I also love how unashamedly laborious this game is: you must control each swipe of a drawn-out sword fight; you have to manually grind and mix herbs for health-restoring concoctions; and if you want anyone to speak to you, you must regularly wash your face (and grubby tunic) so you don’t stink. Last night, I spent 20 minutes hammering out horseshoes in the forge. The opening hours have you hauling sacks of flour around while a tavern landlady swears at you.
I can’t help but respect this naturalist commitment to grime and busywork; knight-life isn’t all horseplay, you know. I have spent many, many hours with this game and I am still basically a stinking peasant. I may well never finish it, but I am resolved to at least get to the point where I have my own steed and a pair of decent boots.
