Why cloud gaming won’t be a mass market success for at least 10 years
I recently said that it would be at least another 10 years before cloud gaming platforms gain mass appeal. As expected, this statement raised some eyebrows in the cloud gaming community. Though this may seem like an arbitrary timeframe at a glance, there is some rationale behind it.
All things considered, a decade is a long time for a service to gain meaningful traction. This is especially true when you take into account that cloud gaming platforms run on expensive servers that cost gobs of money to maintain. But when you take a step back from the fast pace of tech and look at the larger picture, the cloud gaming industry is clearly moving at a much slower pace than the gaming segment at large.
The slow pace of cloud gaming
For starters, players haven’t been as apt to try cloud gaming as some had hoped. According to Business Insider, Stadia fell short of meeting its player goals by “hundreds of thousands” after its launch in late 2019. Google’s not alone, either.
Amazon Luna has been moving at a snail’s pace, as well. After one year on the market, it’s still only accessible by players in the United States. That’s in addition to Luna’s lack of critical features, like friends lists, game achievements, and more.
Meanwhile, Xbox Game Streaming (fondly referred to as xCloud) just recently received a vital hardware upgrade that makes it a more competitive experience. That said, xCloud is still limited to smaller subset of devices when compared to Stadia and Luna, plus streaming stability varies wildly based on players’ locations, making the service unreliable for some.
Then there’s NVIDIA’s GeForce Now, a service that’s plagued by digital queues where gamers have to wait to be assigned a rig before they can play a game. While this isn’t an issue in all locales, even paying subscribers have had to wait in some regions.. As for free tier users, play sessions are limited to one-hour increments.
Cloud gaming and the slow burn to success
Each platform has its own unique issues, but all of them boil down to one overarching problem: they aren’t growing fast enough.
Stadia doesn’t have enough players to entice major developers to port their games to the platform. Luna has yet to summon the bandwidth to branch out beyond the United States. xCloud lacks features and stability. GeForce Now seems to have a strong base of players, but it doesn’t have enough server blades to satisfy all of them.
Now cherrypick just one of these issues, and you’ll notice that it can’t be solved within a year or two. It takes time to build out server blade infrastructures, entice players to sign up, and bring in the most popular games that players demand. Cloud gaming is a slow burn to success. That brings us 10 years into the future.
A new generation of gaming platforms
The typical lifecycle of a gaming console is about 8 years. By the time the Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 are ready to be retired, we’ll be on the cusp of a completely new generation of gaming experiences.
By then, the cloud gaming platforms — or at least the ones that survive — will also be established in the gaming industry. They will have had ample time to sort out their server blade infrastructures, gain marketshare, and build out their game libraries. The global internet infrastructure will also likely undergo huge improvements, making cloud gaming more accessible and stable for a wider range of players.
It will be here, at the 8-year mark, where players will decide if they want to keep purchasing consoles from now until eternity or if they want to forego that expense to game in the cloud.
Now I know what you’re thinking: That’s only eight years. You said ten!
I did say that. As it turns out, not every player is able to grab a shiny new console at launch (even without a pandemic to get in the way). Even for those that can pick up some new hardware, many players like to play the waiting game. As these players hold off, next-gen games will start to land on next-gen consoles and the cloud; it is within this two-year period that the next phase of gamers will decide if gaming in the cloud is a better option for them.
Totally fair. It took Spotify and Netflix the same window of time