>The niche of gamers casual enough to not care about playing over network latency

In the saddest way possible, the niche of gamers are people playing on desktops with ethernet connections.

The majority of gamers are buying booster packs on mobile games.

Yes, but that majority doesn't need cloud gaming precisely because those games run just fine on their phone - there's no benefit in putting them in the cloud, that was supposed to be for fancy stuff where you need a beefy GPU for the eye candy.

It's not 2023 anymore. Have you tried cloud gaming in 2026? I can barely tell it's connected to the cloud.

Yes, it's amazing because it's streaming directly from a computer in the room behind me. :)

And the increases in network speed are one of the last bastions of Moores Law.

> nd the increases in network speed are one of the last bastions of Moores Law.

Throughput has increased but latency hasn’t changed much

Latency hasn’t decreased substantially since the late 90s when I remember getting sub 50 ms ping in Quake III from my dorm room in college

Speed of light doesn't adhere to Moore's law :) and it's made worse by the fact most everyone connects via WiFi these days and it alone adds a few ms more.

I'm not surprised; you need a lot more servers and even so, there are a lot of places where something low ping times is difficult. While there is a lot of room for latency to go down, 1 lightmillisecond is ~300 km (~186 mi). This means that if a computer is 150 km away, 1 ms is the minimum ping allowed by physics, if I am talking directly to it.

By that yardstick, we've actually done very well in a lot of cases. :)