That’s 100% correct, because the shareholders still haven’t learned their lesson from OnLive, Google Stadia, Amazon Luna, Nvidia GeForce Now, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, or Playstation Plus Premium.
Game streaming serices are never going to catch on because the capital needed to build out the infrastructure is ridiculous.
Without even counting the cost of hosting and bandwidth, a game streaming node already costs as much as a gaming PC, easily $2k. Say it gets 100% utilization with four customers each playing 6 hours a day, and that they’re paying $20/month for the service, then it’d take 25 months for that $2k node to pay for itself. However, by that time the hardware will be old and outdated, in need of replacement.
That’s zero return on investment for the lifetime of the hardware, absolutely no profit even in this idealized case unless you can charge more than $20. Add in the monthly expenses for colocation space, power, bandwidth, and overhead and you get a product with zero ROI even at $35/month.
Then, consider that this node can only realistically serve a small geographic area due to network latency limitations, and that using the service requires your customers to already be paying for high-quality broadband, and you’ve got a recipe for a tiny potential customer base and massive capital investment to make nodes available in close enough proximity to all major markets.
I’m confident in my “never” because of the capital economics; the service has to be expensive enough to pay for the infrastructure it requires plus some profit for the shareholders, while simultaneously being cheap enough to offer gamers a better value proposition than buying their own hardware. There’s no margin between those limits, so the only market left for them to appeal to are niches where local rendering performance is limited but network latency and bandwidth are not. Even then, gamers still have the option of streaming from their own hardware using Moonlight rather than paying for a third-party service, so the only customers left are the ones with more money than sense.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the concept (I even bought an OnLive microconsole back in the day and still regularly use a Steam Link to stream games to the living room TV), but it isn’t nearly convenient or performant enough to justify itself as a subscription service.