Stadia ran (runs) well at 50mbps, and their competitors don't require much more (~100mbps for comparable results afaict), and 2x that minimum often results in a flawless experience if you have the bandwidth/latency to back it up (e.g. if you're on a home/work connection, rather than a busy coffee shop).
I put almost 1,000 hours into Stadia across all my games travelling across ~20 states and 3 countries the past ~3 years. It's very rare to find places where it isn't "okay" to play (with some notable exceptions near launch where you'd regularly get ~1 second input delay at times or frozen, pixellated graphics), and in many places now it feels indistinguisable from native/local games.
I don't know which platform I'll move to from Stadia, but it will definitely be a cloud one.
It does not run well at 50mbps, you have artifacts all over the screen, it's unbearable. And as people are moving more towards 1440p or 4k monitors, it's even more untolerable.
It is both. I tried GeForce NOW and it required only about 60Mbps - it was just a fraction of Gbit connection. Still, I sometimes struggled to keep it at that minimum. Variable bandwidth doesn't matter for file downloads or video streaming(where there is few seconds of buffer) but it makes game streaming almost unplayable.
Nah, if you can stream Netflix in 1080p or better and have low latency then game streaming works fine. I know people who do it off LTE without issue even for non competitive games.
Doing this now... what are you expecting to be obvious from this experiment? Obviously the video game has some upstream requirements (just user input), but neither are stuttering or having any issues.
The GP comment you were referring to recommended streaming Netflix in 1080p to, assumedly, compare to streaming games in 1080p, too; not to compare 1080p versus 4K. If you can stream Netflix in 1080p, there's not much additional strain on the network to stream games in 1080p.
Side note: Stadia also supports streaming games in 4K, which will have a relatively equal quality to streaming a 4K movie, for the same reasons. That is the result I see while streaming a movie and a game side-by-side.
I Stream locally from my gaming PC to Nvidia Shield in 4k with around 80 mbps and it looks as good as an HDMI hookup.(and less than that would look fine)
Not with the current internet speed.
The vast majority of people is below anything that would play "okay", and almost everyone is below a speed that would play well (1 GBPS).
Until 1 GBPS is the default EVERYWHERE, streaming games has 0 potential.