People have been crapping on cloud gaming since it was announced. But honestly, there are huge advantages - they just don't work unless you have good internet all the time.

Cloud gaming is something that I do think has the potential to overshadow classic console and pc gaming. But for that to happen, you need extremely reliable low latency internet AND it needs to be mobile as well. Also, and this is key, offered by 1 of the big gaming companies as an alternative to their physical console.

The number one complaint I heard from people online was that this would never work with THEIR internet. Either the download/upload speed was too low or their latency was too inconsistent. So who is this service for (in the U.S.) if the look of your game was garbage due to sub 20Mbs download speed? To those people, this was a complete failure and they openly ripped cloud gaming a new one in every comment section because it was useless (to them).

Big companies saw the potential of rising beyond the limitation of using the same console for 7-8 year lifespans and being able to play anywhere you want to go. They saw new integrations with services - remember when they showed you could go on youtube watching a game video, then click a button in youtube to automatically bring up the game with 0 load times? What about using google home to ask for a hint at what part of the game you were on? Beyond integrations with existing tech, it would allow the development of new types of games due to all calculations being held server side. Massive 3000 player battle royales, hugely destructable online environments, things only possible due to the possible optimization of a server side platform.

So clearly the gamers would see those advantages and come to the cloud side, right? No. Google had possibly the worst reveal for a cloud "console" I have ever seen. They released it showing things like tech specs and confusing the audiences by talking about bitrates. They didn't have any AAA developer exclusive content and could only tell people to imagine the possibilities instead of presenting them at launch. A half ass attempt to become a new Playstation/XBox/Nintendo. When Microsoft earned their chair at the console table, they spent billions towards buying up developers and securing gaming rights (hello every sports game ever). Google just started running some new software on their existing cloud infrastructure. Google saw this as a low investment opportunity that could gain strength over time, but without developing a relationship with the gamers they were trying to garner and without major investment. Without major investment into new exclusive IP and a reputation for dumping projects that didn't provide easy profit, people automatically assumed this was a project doomed to fail.

Of course, they were right. I still believe that cloud gaming WILL, one day, be the major player that the techno-optimists dreamt it would be. But that might require ubiquitous high quality low latency internet. And it will probably come from one of the already major players. Right now, we have XCloud seeing if it can provide what Google could not. But due to internet infrastructure being what it is today (at least in the U.S.) and the cloud gaming well being poisoned by Google, it needs to be shoehorned into Gamepass until the time is right. Sadly, this might mean it won't be what it was dreamt to be for the foreseeable future - until infrastructure of the internet is upgraded and cloud gaming's infancy is forgotten.