[jasonwatkinspdx]

> If a laptop could play games at the quality of a top end PC today, would people really want to pay for an external streaming service, deal with latency, etc just so they can get the last 1% of graphical improvements?

Think of it a different direction: if/when cloud rendering AAA graphics is practical, you can get a very low friction Netflix like experience where you just sit down and go.

[Gigachad]

IMO the service of netflix is the content library and not the fact it's streaming. If the entire show downloaded before playing, it would only be mildly less convenient than streaming it. But I don't think the streaming adds that much convenience to gaming. If your internet is slow enough that downloading the game beforehand is a pain, then streaming is totally out of the question. And gaming is way way less tolerant of network disruption since you can't buffer anything.

Cloud gaming seemingly only helps in the case when you have weak hardware but want to play AAA games. If we could put "good enough" graphics in every device, there would be no need to stream. And I think in 10 years probably every laptop will have built in graphics that are so good that cloud gaming is more trouble than its worth. It might sound unrealistic to say there is a good enough but I think a lot of things have already reached this point. These days screen DPI is largely good enough, sound quality is good enough, device weight/slimness is good enough, etc.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

I'd (gently) say you may be generalizing your own behavior too much. I often just have say 45 minutes to kill and will just browse Netflix to find something to start immediately. Having to wait for a download would send me to something else most likely. Since COVID started, one thing I've heard repeatedly from friends with kids is they manage to carve out an hour or such for a gaming session, sit down, and then have to wait through a mandatory update that ends up killing much of their gaming session. Now add to that the popularity of game pass, and the possibility that "cloud console" offers something similar... there's plenty of people that would love that service imo.