Is it strictly because of latency that the cloud computing revolution hasn't made it all the way to games yet? [closed]

There are a number of Stack Exchange sites where this might potentially be applicable, and I'm not sure which one to pick really.

I was just looking at this answer concerning the essence of cloud computing, and it dawned on me: In some ways, there is some very, very real benefit that the successful application of cloud computing to playing games could bring. In particular, if the games are installed on the cloud, not on your local machine, you wouldn't have to worry about upgrading your computer (or your phone) every five seconds.

However this model is not generally used for AAA video games, just for fairly small stuff that's pretty much on the scale of Adobe Flash apps. So that brings up the question: Why are we still generally installing stuff of any scale locally onto our own personal computers, tablets, and phones? Why are we not just playing it all directly off of some cloud servers instead?

The main thing that came to mind was latency. (Of course there's also something fun about having a special console, like a Switch or a PS4, so we'll give some ground there.) In terms of a PC or a phone, while this would be nice to have, having each and every individual button/keypress, mouse click, joystick movement, and so on have to be sent up to the cloud to be processed; then having to get the result back from the cloud to visually and audibly show the user what that did in the actual game - that may just be a little too much for today's infrastructure. We have been playing MMOs in real time for quite a while now, but maybe the added functionality would just result in too much of a delay to keep everything in real time.

Or maybe not. But in either case, is this the only holdup? Is this the only reason we're still going to stuff like Steam and installing games on our computers, instead of just playing almost everything directly through Steam on a network cloud somewhere?

The biggest problem is currently latency, but it's a huge one. Unlike with movies or music, even a .2 second delay on your connection can make a game literally unplayable. I see you give the example of MMOs, but MMOs have a problem pretty much the same as this: even minor, fraction-second latency spikes can really make the game feel unresponsive and unfun.

A second big problem is that you need large amounts of bandwidth to stream games. Google Stadia and Geforce Now both have a requirement of at least 25 Megabit/second throughput connections, because they need to stream 60 FPS full HD content to your computer. This might seem like it's a relatively low barrier, but it's not. There are still many places, even in developed countries, where broadband is very expensive or even at all unavailable. For example, the United States has millions of households (roughly 1/4th of their country by latest statistics) without broadband internet. Many Americans live in rural areas where the commercial internet service providers have decided to do stuff like not cover those who live at the outskirts of villages and will only extend cables if the home owners pay for it, which can cost hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars.

Related to acute bandwidth needs are long-term bandwidth needs. Both Stadia and Geforce Now use at least 10 GB of bandwidth per hour. That's an obscenely high amount for on-demand entertainment. Netflix uses 3 GB per hour. Spotify uses 40 MB per hour. Let's say I want to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. If I download it, it's 250 GB. That's a lot, but if I want to play it using cloud gaming, just playing an hour per day will get you to 300 GB per month. 2 hours per day and you're at 600 GB. For a HUGE amount of people, that's already pretty close to, if not significantly over their bandwidth caps, even if you ignore that they probably want to consume other content as well.

Finally, there's the problem of game availability and ownership. If I own a personal copy of a game on my computer, I can be fairly certain I can play that game regardless of whether my internet is available, especially for singleplayer games. With cloud gaming, you need to have high bandwidth internet accessible in order to play your game. You most likely won't be able to play with multiple people on the same connection, and other people using your connection to download stuff or watch streams will likely suffer.

A footnote on Stadia: Stadia has the additional issue that any game you wish to play on Stadia has to be bought from their store and cannot be taken offline afterwards. You are effectively tied to Google for these games, and if Google Stadia were to be closed down, you'd effectively lose access to these games. However, I don't think this is a problem with cloud gaming as much as it is a problem with Google's business model, and Geforce Now does not have this issue, because you pretty much play your own games.