I've heard people play Fortnite Festival (basically Rock Band, and very latency sensitive) over Microsoft/Amazon cloud streaming.
"low bitrate and high input latency" is what you'd expect rendering offsite, but in practice, it seems to work surprisingly well.
It didn't seem any worse than cloud gaming on Xbox/PS Now/Luna/Nvidia/etc.
I contest that rhythm games are the least latency sensitive. You'll automatically adjust to (consistent) latency and not notice it. You also don't get much feedback unless you miss a note.
Stadia worked absurdly well. One of the beta games was Thumper, a demanding rhythm game (I might be the reason why it was in the beta lineup actually). How well did that work out? Well, the latency made it hard to play... until I switched my TV to so-called "gaming mode". And then it was fine.
No kidding. The TV was introducing more latency than Stadia itself.
I also once tested it on hotel wifi. It worked great.
(Mind you, this was in Europe. YMMV.)
The business model however was terrible and killed the product IMO. Which, honestly, good: Stadia would have killed video game archiving efforts. If a publisher folds and Stadia and similar platforms stop streaming its streaming-exclusives, then those games are gone. Not worth it, no matter how well it worked.
If they decide one day to fuck you over, there is nothing you can do about it.
If Sony and MSFT decide to go down this route and it's the only way to play blockbuster games, it'll happen whether we like it or not because the market cares far more about playing the latest game than it does maintaining control over its own destiny so to speak. Very few consumers will eschew the Latest Thing and just happily play older games on their own PC (or console) to make a point to the publishers.
You'll note that all those things are still there, and their competitors are either not there or not significantly bolstered by people disgruntled by those changes.
And making media subscription more expensive will just push more people to piracy, so they will just loose money due to their greed.
Maybe, or maybe it'll live a giant gap waiting to be filled in by a new competitor in the console market.
It is not suitable for competition ranked players. The average player will stomp over high ranked players.
There are lots of techniques to hide latency.
I don't get the thing about the GPU: even rich people don't necessarily want to bother with owning a GPU thing. And whether fast internet is expensive depends on where you live. Here in Singapore 10 Gbps fibre to the home starts at around 20 USD per month; and we are in a really high cost of living country (we usually topped charts of 'most expensive city to live in').
Thanks to your refinements, we know that remote gaming like this might not work for the hillbillies, but perhaps it might work in the centres of civilisation?
Stadia had other issues beyond fast Internet, like asking a community focused on Windows/DirectX to add support for the Stadia/Vulkan stack.
At the last Stadia developers conference, a few months before it was killed, one of the talks was about doing something like Proton for Stadia.
EDIT: Here is the talk,
"How to write a Windows emulator from scratch"
that sounds like a broadening market to me.
Global access to high speed home Internet is growing not shrinking, there are plenty of ways to creatively manage latency especially when you control the endpoints, and at the end of the day the publishers can effectively force the transition by only making the latest blockbuster games available on the cloud model.
You and I will bitch and moan but the vast majority of consumers (really their parents who pay for them) will be happy their new console is small, light, potentially cheaper, and silent. No more boxes of games to store makes Mom happier. Eventually much of the hardware could be built into televisions from affiliated manufacturers so all you have to do is buy controllers and sign up for the subscription(s).
I, and probably a lot of the people here, spend so much time on the PC that every additional msec annoys me. If there's keyboard shortcut, then I'll learn it to avoid using the mouse.
Windows being a bloated slow mess even when run locally means that using it remotely all the time would be like torture.
I'm sure dealing with the 4k60 videos from my cameras would be a world of pain on the cloud too.
I don't need or want to pay a subscription for the tool I use for hours a day, with no advantages beyond vendor lock-in.
You need a computer either way... remote is basically all negatives when compared to local.
You are probably correct about 90% however.
90% of people are pretty ignorant about how their computers work, or how to use them more efficiently. They line up like lemmings to lose autonomy over their devices and pay subscriptions in exchange for the barest crumb of convenience.
The big difference is the hardware evolution, now the rooms are full of server racks with sliding pizza boxes, and the terminals are prettier.
With multi-player games you are running a local simulation and it gets resolved server side and then reconciled locally. This hides lag and works great.
You lose this with streaming. Latency is constant and total. It's just not realistic.
You mention one great technique yourself already.
I believe their point was that this can't be done, since the "local simulation" is no longer running locally; it has to resolve & hide the latency _before_ it's transmitted to you, and you don't know what latency that frame will observe.
For a slightly silly example, see what mosh is doing to hide ssh latency.
Not necessarily, why?
The generalised idea that I see is: 'what can you do with beefy processing in the cloud (but behind a latency hop) and a very small amount of processing power locally?'
A VR example: you do most of the rendering on the server, but you do all the correction for small head movements locally. The server has to send a bit more (and not just as a flat image), but you get over the nausea.
Something like this has been state of the art for ages. And I only say 'something like this' because I don't remember the details.
As a generalised solution if you have crazy amounts of bandwidth to burn: the server is a latency hop behind, so it could send all possible futures that correspond to the inputs that might have happened during that latency hop, and the client picks what to display.
As written, this is crazy. But if instead of all possible futures you have a probability model of human input, and you send the most likely futures, you can probably make it work. Especially if you don't insist on sending raw video. (And even with raw video, you can save a lot of bandwidth by using a special codec that can compress multiple video streams simultaneously by taking advantage of inter-stream redundancies.)
As an example: with this system in the original Super Mario Bros your probability model would most of the time say that the user is most likely to just keep doing what they were doing (running right, or holding the jump button etc). Crucially, in the long run Mario will behave as if he jumped exactly when you pressed the jump button, but you might see a short visual glitch where Mario seems to be doing something wrong or weird, but it'll correct itself very quickly.
Similar to how mosh's predictions work.
If you add a bit of extra smarts locally, you can even add some cheap interpolation between possible futures to try to cover some that the server hasn't sent.
Mostly, what the local player and what the other players are doing will have differ between 'futures', but eg you'll mostly likely to be able to re-use the complex lighting rendering for the fully realistic leafy trees and blades of grass you see in the background between nearly all your possible 'futures'.
And while you're right that the computation on the client end could be made lower (depending on the constraints of the game), you're now going to need to care about the hardware of the client beyond "can render a video stream". My (regretfully) smart TV has trouble rendering its own menus, it's not lifting a finger to do a game.
And for best effects, of course, you'd also want to get support from the game itself. AI coding will make this part easier, because there's probably relatively common techniques you can apply to your games to get most of the benefit.
Just to be sure: I'm just outlining what could be done to make remote gaming viable, even with the latency constraints. I'm not saying that this will definitely happen, nor that it's even particularly likely.
Perhaps even low end local devices will just be fast enough to give people good enough games anyway. Nowadays even phones are capable of astonishing feats.
What does this have to do with anything? Why do you want to restrict yourself to such an austere setting?