Stadia’s death isn’t the end of cloud gaming

polygon.com:

An understandable knee-jerk response to Google shuttering its Stadia game-streaming service is: That must be it for cloud gaming, right? We have proven that nobody wants it. Now go away with your laggy, fuzzy, insubstantial server-side gaming. The market says no.

This is not the first time this has happened. Cloud gaming service OnLive tried to steal a march on a nascent technology in 2010 — disastrously too early, it turned out. The service was closed in 2015 after Sony bought it to, essentially, strip it for parts. Stadia, which was launched by one of the world’s richest companies, boasted cutting-edge engineering, and was located at the physical heart of the internet — i.e., in Google’s data centers — lasted half as long. That seems to imply a downward trajectory for a technology that many gamers, with a longstanding attachment to local play on consoles and PCs, are skeptical of.

But this assumption would be a mistake. Cloud gaming still has many hurdles to overcome: technical, logistical, in terms of marketing and public perception. But it also has enormous potential benefits in terms of accessibility and ease of use. The truth is that Stadia’s failure is purely and solely down to Google. It chose the wrong strategy for the wrong moment, and then, despite its limitless resources, simply gave up.

Even though Stadia’s 2019 launch came nine long years after OnLive’s, and in the wake of other, similar services like PlayStation Now and Nvidia’s GeForce Now, back then it was early days for cloud gaming — and it still is now. There are multiple things holding back our readiness for this technology.

First among them is the quality of data networks (both wired and wireless), which varies enormously by geography, and has a far