If you came back in time ten years and told me that one day we'd all be gaming on cheap devices, playing games in high resolutions, high settings and at 60FPS, I'd have believed you, I'd have known I was right.
Back then, from 2011 to 2013, I used a service called Onlive, which is pretty much the daddy to all the online game streaming services we have today.
It simply hosted games in the cloud and let you play them, with keyboard and mouse or controller. There were many great titles. I spent tons of time playing Flatout 2, Homefront, Assassin's Creed, Red Faction Guerrilla, etc.
And my PC back then couldn't handle any of these, it was total trash. This made 10/11/12 year old me really quite happy.
Onlive worked on my 2mbps connection somehow, and it honestly seemed like the future, it was a brilliant idea and nothing could go wrong...
Then for what I assume was financial trouble, Sony bought them, shut down the service and years later it became Playstation Now, which is a good service now, but had Onlive kept going, things could be a lot bigger now.
During all the time Onlive was offline, I just wondered to myself:
"Why hasn't anyone tried this yet?"
Everything was moving into the cloud. My photos, music, videos were in the cloud, social media all works in the cloud, Steam got cloud sync, consoles got cloud sync, everything was going online and requiring more and more bandwidth.
Services like Netflix exploded in popularity, but things kept quiet... No gane streaming.
Playstation Now launched kinda badly, really restrictive and could still be a lot better, I felt as if something was wrong, it was an obvious missed opportunity.
But things changed.
2 big players came into this game. Well, 3, but one kinda flopped.
Nvidia, Microsoft and Google.
Nvidia launched GeForce Now and for the first time I actually felt excited for something like this. Sure, you needed to own the games already, but you have your own very powerful PC right there anywhere.
Google launched Stadia and this felt it was going to be a whole lot more like Onlive. More convenient, more available, etc. Unfortunately Google did tons of mistakes and it ended being somewhat of a failure even if it is slowly recovering.
Then Microsoft came along with xCloud, something I had absolutely no hype for when it was announced. After seeing how Playstation Now turned out, I thought that only Nvidia could actually do something to improve it, but oh boy was I wrong.
When xCloud finally became available here in Brazil, I had Gamepass Ultimate and to be honest, I wasn't very interested... But decided to try it anyways.
And oh. My. God.
THIS is what I've been waiting for, this is the new Onlive for me, but even better.
It has its flaws, which I've catalogued in a previous post, but the sheer quantity of games, how good the service runs and the fact that the Xbox division is in everyone's good graces right now gives me tons of hope.
Now I don't have to carry around my huge gaming PC everywhere, I can just use xCloud (or stream from my PC using Parsec but that still requires a PC).
Recently I took a vacation to my aunt's lakehouse, we had no wifi, no TV, no nothing and I wanted to game with my cousin.
Turned on my phone's hotspot, connected my laptop to it and done. We were playing Gang Beasts and Forza Horizon 5, using only around 800mbs-1gb per hour.
This is insane. For just R$200 a year I can get what is essentially a portable Xbox Series X that I can just hook up anywhere.
But can this replace your current console or PC?
I'd say that for now it depends on what kind of gamer you are. If you want to play things outside of the Xbox ecosystem, you'll still need a PC, a powerful one.
But if you are okay with the offerings that xCloud currently has, it's the same thing as getting an Xbox.
My friend was going to buy a powerful expensive PC to play the games he wanted, he saw me playing on xCloud and fell in love.
He completely gave up on that idea, bought an older but not terrible laptop and signed up for xCloud.
Our other friend did the same thing whilst only having a smartphone, and now we're all playing together online, something we couldn't even dream of doing before because everything is so expensive.
It replaced consoles and powerful gaming PCs for them, and we're just at the beginning, the beginning of something that can turn out to be great.
Something that I'm almost 100% sure will change the way we look at gaming.
All xCloud needs now is to allow us to play games from outside of Gamepass, and that is coming.
This truly is the future, it's 12 year old me's dream coming true finally.
Who knows, maybe I'll be able to sell my PC eventually even? Finally get a new M1 Macbook.
Thanks for reading.
