Edge computing (<5ms from your location) may be able to make this a reality for people close to populated areas.
It's not clear to me why it never picked up in the US.
Probably the reason it never picked up in the US is that cities and towns sprawl so much in the US that PC cafes could never be just walking distance down the street from most peoples' homes.
And some places are trivially obviously viable, population-wise, like just outside of, or even within, universities (and especially University towns), but PC cafes are still absent, so walking distance doesn't really explain it.
It seems to be more of a cultural issue. It's clearly the best solution for the cash-strapped gamer today and especially so for the last 10 years. Perhaps it simply boils down to the much larger emphasis on console-gaming than PC gaming -- but if that's the case, then cloud-PC-gaming is just as fucked as PC-cafes.
Particularly since it doesn't fulfill all the same needs as arcades did -- you get the game, but you lose the social aspects, and you lose the ability to play games while outside (and more importantly, for short duration, and for cheap, at least on a per-play basis).
But perhaps general wealth is sufficient to explain the difference.
For your definition of efficient, maybe. As a strawman, for the father who wants to get in a few minutes of gaming now that the kids are asleep and can't or won't spend the money on a high-end gaming rig capable of playing modern day AAA games, Stadia is the answer. He can start a game in less time that it takes to drive to the nearest pc cafe. Assuming his wife will let him leave to do so. There's no comparison in terms of convenience or efficiency.
The target market isn't really twitch gamers sitting on super-high-end machines playing all hours of the night and naturally they're derisive of Stadia because it isn't meant for them. Stadia is meant for casual / semi-casual gamers who don't want to invest in up to date hardware but still want to play modern games.
If you want to understand why PC Cafes didn't take off I'd argue the reasons are similar to why Netflix, et al have killed the movie theatre industry in the US. At-home convenience is preferred to a communal experience particularly when costs come in to play.
Also, maps can be huge compared to a few years ago. Take a look at this comparison: https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/large-vi... Granted, one shouldn’t keep the whole map in memory, but all that detail takes up storage space.
As for RAM usage, any data sent to the GPU and back has to come from or land in the RAM. With increasing texture sizes, model detail, etc, all that data has to sit in RAM until it’s sent to the GPU for rendering. But you can’t discard it because you’ll need most of it for the next frame.
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Re: maps: I think FlightGear[0], a flight simulator, gets it right. You can download sections of the world’s terrain and save them to the folder, or you can use a feature (program that runs in the background) called terrasync[1] that downloads and caches the world terrain as needed (in 10°*10° chunks).