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I agree that we should not declare it as without obstacles. But neither as useless because it doesn't meet the demand of "gamers"

I used to be a gamer, playing hours competing online every day around the Diablo 2/Warcraft 3 times but have since largely lost interest in it as a hobby.

These days I'm more interested in killing a half hour here and there, sometimes a rainy sunday afternoon. Almost exlusively more narative driven or not very mechanically demanding single player, often turn based games and couch coop.

I'm pretty happy with my Switch as the only gaming device, but I find it a hassle to look up which games are out, check reviews to see if their worth buying, maybe wait for a discount and wait for download. Then feeling bad for not having finished most.

So a service which I can just pull up when I feel like it, and click on a random game and immediately start playing for a while then either move on or come back is very attractive to me, and unlike other streaming services I don't care much about owning the product.

That said, I have never tried cloud gaming service, but for the convenience I'd be willing to make quite some concessions. E.g. keeping the Switch for the 2-3 fast paced party games I play.

Worth mentioning that one of the most popular games on twitch right now is Among Us which basically has SNES graphics

Incidentally, that game does have some slightly-complicated timing in specific cases, and a lag spike leading to revealing who is the bad guy would ruin an entire round.

> a lag spike leading to revealing who is the bad guy

This has happened to me...

When my GPU died I still could play most 3d games at 720p on my iGPU. I'm sure you could play 70% of all games ever made directly on a cheap AMD APU system that would cost $300 at most.

The current monthly price is just for early access. It says on the page that the price will change on the full launch, but does not say what it will change to.

I don’t know, I got playstation now a year ago and played a bunch of games in the cloud with my playstation and it worked pretty flawlessly. I was surprised.

In my experience the video compression on PS Now is very noticeable, especially in dark scenes. Lag is usually fine at least for games that aren't particularly lag sensitive, but there are days when it's spiking so much it's unplayable (and online games installed locally are fine). I haven't been using the streaming much recently, though: now that it lets you download most PS4 games there's not much point to the streaming except for those games that require it or quickly trying out a game or playing on a non-PS4 device.

I used it mostly to try out games, and then because I didn’t have enough disk space due to freaking warzone. But yeah the rest never bothered me.

>The price looks really good compared to Stadia, and being able to use a dirt cheap Fire Stick that many already have instead of a $100 hardware investment is a huge plus.

I don't get this statement. Don't you need to purchase an Amazon Controller for $50 and if you want a good SoC and 4K capability you'll also need to purchase a Fire Stick 4K at about $50 which brings the total to $100.

As for Stadia - there's no need to purchase a Stadia controller or Chromecast 4K. I've used an Xbox controller and Chrome to play just fine.

You can also use any bluetooth controller and Xbox One with Luna it says. And the Fire TV stick 4k is 25$ right now.

So it does seem there are lower entry options for TV use.