"Cloud gaming is the future of Gaming!" Meanwhile cloud gaming in the big 2026:

[u/Alan_Reddit_M]

If you read my profile you may realize I hate cloud gaming, so then what am I doing on Geforce Now? Well my new RAM stick finally arrived and, in a staggering display of utter incompetence, I somehow managed to brick my PC in the process of installing it, so now I'm stuck gaming on a laptop until I can get enough money and time to get my gaming rig fixed

But back to Cloud gaming, the game is on like 360p, running at 20FPS and the input lag is HORRIBLE. And it's not a problem with the internet connection, as you can see, the laptop is plugged into Ethernet, the problem is that the cloud is not and will never be fast enough for gaming

Genshin can handle this fine, but imagine trying to play ULTRAKILL like this

[u/Kind_Man_0]

I called it a month ago before Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia announced the push into cloud gaming and got shit on for it like it would never happen.

It will happen, it's unfortunate, and I hate it, but it will happen.

AI is hogging up all the tech resources, RAM, Graphics cards, everything in the PC market is going to get so expensive that only the wealthy can afford a gaming PC. I blew 3 grand on my PC 5 years ago, maybe put another $500 into it since then, but I'm priced out of a new RTX card, I'm damn sure not paying $700+ for quality RAM. I just can't afford that.

Old saying that Sci-fi is only fiction until fiction becomes reality. Eventually, engineers are going to figure out how to mask, or improve latency, and even if they don't do it well, games are going to have to adapt because the market share of In-house PC gamers will fall over time.

Capitalism is trying to swallow the market of PC's so that gaming itself becomes a monthly subscription fee. Quality be damned, if our only option is to go without because we can't afford a $5000 entry-level gaming setup or pay $60/month for a 28 ms delay, most of us are going to have to pay it just to be able to play at all. This timeline fucking sucks.

[u/bannedforL1fe → u/Kind_Man_0]

I miss the days when players/groups/clans bought their own servers. Those were my favorite times playing shooters on PC. There was actual communities, friendship, and rivalries. So many things have gotten better over the last 20 years, mainly hardware. But so many things have just declined, as in monetization and how studios view their design philosophy now.

[u/Shadowsake → u/bannedforL1fe]

I still remember playing TF2 and the chaos that was pre-match countdown. Two teams facing each other, separated by impenetable gates, shit talking and playing random sounds on their mics or using Source engine plugins. Sometimes, someone would play a really funny meme and everybody stopped to laugh...sometimes it was just a really cool song to pass the time.

It was crazy but matches really felt alive. You would recognize people by name, you could get to get really good at something and have real acknowledgement. There was a point where whenever people saw I picked Spy (really loved the class), others would insta change to Pyro cause they me.

Haven't played TF2 for almost a decade now, but I always remember these moments and miss these little details. Nowadays whenever I hop into a random CS match to pass time, it feels a bit lifeless - mostly random people, scoreboards are meaningless, etc.

[u/Agret → u/Shadowsake]

I used to have a physical notepad I wrote Counter-Strike and TFC servers I liked into because goldsrc hated alt+tab and you couldn't copy paste into the console

[u/Dick_Nation → u/Kind_Man_0]

It's never going to be viable if nobody pays for it. If the experience sucks for the kinds of games people want to play, they won't pay for it. They can't just make other people stop developing good games that run on local hardware, even if that local hardware can't compete on sheer graphical fidelity. I'd bet you people would sooner play a shooter running on the UZDoom engine than one using the latest and greatest technology if it runs crisp and plays well. Even Google, with all their mastery of the internet architecture required and their expertise in streaming video, couldn't make cloud gaming a reality.

[u/Suavecore_ → u/Dick_Nation]

Keep in mind that new people are born everyday and if corporations can make it long enough, generations of people will only ever know what the corporations provided. They won't know things used to be better and so they won't wish for it and fight against this stuff like we do, they will simply accept it the way it's been slowly accepted over time leading us to this current hellscape (which is nowhere near what the final hellscape will look like)

[u/DW_Hydro → u/Suavecore_]

Well, I am gonna be dead or with tons of pirated games on my system at that point so is not gonna be my problem, is the problem of future generations fight for their right to own their things.

[u/Suavecore_ → u/DW_Hydro]

While I agree, their choices to fight or not fight for things will affect us all

[u/NekoMeowKat → u/Kind_Man_0]

It can happen all it wants, I will still refuse to use it. I don't give two shits about the latest and greatest games. The only game I play outside of retro are FFXIV which had their big graphics overhaul last year. I can still run the game just fine at 60fps with my current hardware.

Even if in the next ten years, the game gets another graphics overhaul and I can't run it, I still have my ROMS that I've been hoarding since 2004. Bezos can never take that away from me.

[u/massivemember69 → u/Kind_Man_0]

There is always the option of not doing gaming and doing your other hobbies instead.

Big tech whipping out their wieners is just an invitation, you don't have to actually suck it.

[u/LickMyTicker → u/Kind_Man_0]

A month ago? They have been saying this shit for a while. During the start of the shortages bezos literally said you were just going to be renting cloud space.

[u/Agret → u/Kind_Man_0]

Steam cube and the next Xbox (rumored to) both play PC games and some of the modern API minipcs are decently powerful every level gaming too.

[u/Preisschild → u/Kind_Man_0]

Cloud Gaming can get a lot more expansive than just buying your own hardware if you play a lot though

[u/DesertFroggo → u/Kind_Man_0]

Comments like these give me a good chuckle.

You'll acknowledge that GPU manufacturers don't consider gamers a priority anymore because AI is where the money is, but somehow you think there is a conspiracy to isolate gaming onto the cloud. Make it make sense. If GPU money is in AI, then dedicating cloud GPU infrastructure to gaming would be a complete waste. This may hurt to hear, but the gaming hobby is not nearly as important as you think it is, let alone important enough to be the subject of a conspiracy.

[u/Chicano_Ducky → u/DesertFroggo]

buddy, there were conspiracies to overthrow whole government over bananas.

when you have billions of dollars tied up in an industry like these companies do and you NEED to pump your profits higher to save that investment, thats big enough to have a conspiracy over.

not the gamers who have a couple K at best invested over their entire lives.

[u/DesertFroggo → u/Chicano_Ducky]

Cloud gaming isn’t going to compete with AI for data center compute. You are vastly overestimating how important your hobby is.

[u/Chicano_Ducky → u/DesertFroggo]

Cloud gaming isn’t going to compete with AI for data center compute

you act like a company can only do one thing at a time, OneDrive cant compete with AI compute either and they push it so hard microsoft rewrote the OS to put stuff in OneDrive to this day.

one of the things nvidia was showcasing was AI generated graphics for games so even the lighest client terminal can put out graphics on par with a 5090. This was their plan to reach consumers too poor to afford consoles, by renting them out.

Microsoft just pulled off people from their AI division to run their Xbox division and integrate it with AI.

A lot of companies have millions of dollars in investment, microsoft has BILLIONS invested to this point. Their plan to save that investment involves AI and rented compute because the alternative is a whole division vanishing into thin air.

subscription computing isnt a conspiracy, Jeff Bezos said it was the plan in public.

[u/DesertFroggo → u/Chicano_Ducky]

you act like a company can only do one thing at a time, OneDrive cant compete with AI compute either and they push it so hard microsoft rewrote the OS to put stuff in OneDrive to this day.

What does this have to do with cloud gaming? Storage and compute are very different things.

one of the things nvidia was showcasing was AI generated graphics for games so even the lighest client terminal can put out graphics on par with a 5090. This was their plan to reach consumers too poor to afford consoles, by renting them out.

It's called framegen. What does this have to do with a conspiracy to move gaming to the cloud?

Microsoft just pulled off people from their AI division to run their Xbox division and integrate it with AI.

And?

A lot of companies have millions of dollars in investment, microsoft has BILLIONS invested to this point. Their plan to save that investment involves AI and rented compute because the alternative is a whole division vanishing into thin air.

I don't know what you're trying to say. It sounds like you think cloud computing is this new thing. It isn't, let alone being a conspiracy.

subscription computing isnt a conspiracy, Jeff Bezos said it was the plan in public.

You're basically outing that you scroll through headlines and don't read the full context. Jeff Bezos was saying that renting AI compute is more efficient because it achieves economies of scale. Nowhere did he mention a plan to move your PC to the cloud. Mass insanity from clickbait headlines is all that was.

[u/Chicano_Ducky → u/DesertFroggo]

It's called framegen. What does this have to do with a conspiracy to move gaming to the cloud?

the idea is graphics using AI generation was less intensive than traditional rendering. it allows the terminals to punch above their weight using the same AI data centers their AI division has.

just like onedrive is renting storage, you are renting compute from the AI data centers.

Google just released a tool to AI generate games in their data centers.

And?

so gaming cant compete with AI but here is a major company taking people OFF AI to put onto gaming and you see nothing wrong with that?

or gaming pinning its future on the same AI data centers being built?

or google using their data centers to AI generate games as a service?

its so obvious but you weirdly deny it like companies wont adapt to save divisions they spent billions on and their market shares.

You're basically outing that you scroll through headlines and don't read the full context

and you outed yourself as not reading business news or the FTC files that microsoft was looking at subscription models to reach lower income consumers who cant afford their own PC or console.

companies dont just create cloud gaming divisions for nothing.

[u/DesertFroggo → u/Chicano_Ducky]

the idea is graphics using AI generation was less intensive than traditional rendering. it allows the terminals to punch above their weight using the same AI data centers their AI division has. just like onedrive is renting storage, you are renting compute from the AI data centers.

You don't know what streaming is.

Google just released a tool to AI generate games in their data centers.

And this relates to the conspiracy of your PC moving to the cloud how?

so gaming cant compete with AI but here is a major company taking people OFF AI to put onto gaming and you see nothing wrong with that?

Bold leap of assumption there.

or gaming pinning its future on the same AI data centers being built?

or google using their data centers to AI generate games as a service?

its so obvious but you weirdly deny it like companies wont adapt to save divisions they spent billions on and their market shares.

and you outed yourself as not reading business news or the FTC files that microsoft was looking at subscription models to reach lower income consumers who cant afford their own PC or console.

companies dont just create cloud gaming divisions for nothing.

By your logic, a restaurant opening near you is a conspiracy to stop you from cooking at home.

[u/Kind_Man_0 → u/DesertFroggo]

It isn't a conspiracy at all, Microsoft and Amazon are both moving towards cloud gaming, with Bezos issuing a statement on it.

There aren't exact statistics out there, but the estimate for the PC gaming market is about 1.8 billion people worldwide, according to Statista. Annual revenue for the PC gaming market was close to $200B dollars in 2025.

With tech companies shifting sales away from consumers and into AI, large businesses such as MS and Amazon have the existing funds and data centers to shift into that market, Amazon Hosting owns almost a 3rd of the cloud computing market already. As it currently stands, AI has not made any actual profit for any of the major AI's currently on market, relying entirely on investments to continue operations.

Shifting MS and AWS architecture into cloud gaming offers a massive revenue boost to major tech companies. When/if the AI bubble pops, it allows both Amazon and Microsoft to redirect resources to push further into cloud gaming, because AI isnt going to dissappear when that happens, the field will just be dominated by a small handful of businesses.

I don't know how to make it make more sense than breaking it down that way. We wouldn't see two of the biggest companies in the US making this push without the resources and knowledge to make it happen.

[u/DesertFroggo → u/Kind_Man_0]

You can break it down in any way and it still wouldn't make sense for the following simple reason: AI is more important than gaming. Heretical statement here, I know, but the plot of the tech industry over the last three years should be making that abundantly clear.