Steaming Games wont take off IMO.

Asmon said multiple times that he think streaming games as a service like Stadia will eventually take off. He said "who doesn't think so?". Well...I don't think so here I am and here's why.

1. The technology.

The biggest limitation is the latency. This has to do with the time it takes for light to go through fiber optic cables and last time I checked, speed of light isn't getting any faster.

I tried Google stadia at a friend's house. The latency is okay but not good. It definitely not good enough for competitive shooters and I don't see it getting better.

There's non competitive games but now it's a service that lets you play one type of game but not another while buying a computer lets you do both.

2. The economics.

This is what I really have an issue with. I'll be straight up and say I'm biased against it. This isn't streaming games. Let's cut the crap. This is a computer rental service. They are rent seeking.

So their costs will be the cost of the compute parts + billing costs, services costs, advertisement costs, and all these other costs you do not have if you just buy the computer yourself.

So how are they closing the price gap? I honestly do not know. I simply don't see it.

In a traditional rental service like power tools at Home Depot, you don't use your tools all the time. They can rent this downtime away and get higher usage out of it. This fundamentally doesn't work for video cards.

It's true you do not game while you sleep but can they rent out a video card when you sleep? Turns out everyone is sleeping as well. What you really need to look at is the daily 24 hour peak player count. You need a video card for every customer at that peak moment every single day. When the peak player count drops you will have under utilization exactly like owning a computer.

What % of people play games every single day? I play games every single day, at least 1 hour during the same prime time. Asmon does as well. I'm sure most people here do so as well. It's like renting something you use every single day of the week, it doesn't make sense.

These companies cannot rent to us during the day latency from US to Asia is insane. So these video cards can really only serve their local markets. Latency is probably unplayable if you streamed from east coast to west coast.

If you are a frequent gamer you will benefit from buying a computer. If you are an infrequent gamer....you are probably also better off buying a computer because it's not like the subscription service gets any cheaper. You're not renting power tools where you use it for a day and not again for 5 years. It's not that kind of market.

What I think is going on is the $12 or whatever Google wants per month is really a bait price. It doesn't reflect their costs. Eventually they have to transition to the enshitification model where they jack up the price to reflect the real costs of the service. My prediction is either these services all die or they will eventually get jacked up to $50 a month if they get significant marketshare and move to the extraction phase. Maybe they can offer a cheap enough price if they add Surge Pricing like Uber where if you play during 8pm to 12pm it cost you 100% more. Oh, also weave in ads before and after every game. If they do that then maybe it would be profitable. Also sell your personal data, don't forget about that.

The only benefit to video game streaming is for your phone which has much less powerful hardware and there's no alternative. However there is software out there in that allows you to remotely access your home computer and stream from that. We might live in a future where we can activate our desktop computers and stream from our very own RTX 5000 series powered desktop and not pay anybody.

Maybe I'm missing something. Do any of you use the service? If you do, I really want to know why.