I obviously don't have numbers at hand, but I'd bet most people have a internet connection with a latency of at least 100ms to closest game service servers, unless you already work in IT or adjacent sectors where latency matters more. Not even 50% of people online in the US are connected via fiber optic connections, so extrapolate that over the rest of the world, although many countries have better connections than available in the US.
There are a lot of sources of total latency in most games and systems that affect how long it takes between when you click a button and get a response. This means that there's often opportunities for optimizations that can remove entire frames of latency to make up for the additional network lag. It's not going to be enough for e-sports games but it can keep the experience from changing for many titles.
Just as an example of what I'm talking about, if you turn on the nVidia Reflex latency reduction feature along with the DLSS 3 AI Frame Generation, you get the same latency as with Reflex off but with much better smoothness. Of course if you're playing Overwatch you are chasing every millisecond of latency, but for most games it just needs to be low enough not to be noticeable.
Only 2% of the US population owns a Xbox Series S/X, 2.3% own a PS5.
The average internet speed in the US in 2022 is 120mbps.
Asking people to have a >250mbps connection to using cloud gaming vs being one of the most popular gaming consoles in the country isn't much to ask... in order to be a moderately successful game platform.
>I've played a 50hrs of Xbox cloud games in the last 2yrs and never had latency issues
Gonna be honest , I'm not taking gaming advice off someone who has played only 2 hours per month.
Especially with regards to something like input lag.
I don't play competitive online high framerate FPS games where that level of input matters. If I did I would invest in a windows PC.
But for all of the single player games I played it was never a noticeable problem. If you're going to complain about anything with cloud gaming it should be switching or starting a new game. The loading screen preamble before the game start screen is the only annoying part. But that doesn't affect gameplay.
If input lag was such a real problem I highly doubt Xbox would have redesigned their new 2023 Xbox UI to be 100% centered around Gamepass (The current one already pushes it hard but the new one leaked on Youtube makes it the near default).
The people saying this either haven't used it recently or need a modern ISP