Forecast essays
Forward-looking pieces about where the cloud gaming category is headed.
16 essays
- ·8 min read
Cloud gaming five years from now
The 2030 picture: post-AV1 codecs, region-by-region rather than provider-by-provider competition, the death of low-end gaming PCs, and the consolidation we don't think is coming.
By Marin Björk - ·7 min read
Cloud gaming runs Windows VMs. Should it?
Every major cloud gaming service runs Windows-on-bare-metal in the data center. The architecture is incidental rather than deliberate. The 2027-2028 question is whether the industry should keep doing it.
By Alex Tan - ·7 min read
Smart TV cloud gaming finally works in 2026
Samsung Gaming Hub, LG GameQuick, Vizio's quieter cloud play. The TV-app cloud gaming pitch was disastrous in 2022, dubious in 2024. In 2026 it's actually working. Here's what changed.
By Marin Björk - ·7 min read
An ad-supported cloud gaming tier is coming and it's going to be ugly
Streaming video moved to ad-supported tiers. Music followed. Cloud gaming is structurally next, and the ad-supported cloud gaming product is going to be a mess — but it's still going to ship.
By Marin Björk - ·9 min read
The Chinese cloud gaming market the West doesn't see
Tencent's Start, NetEase's cloud platforms, Huawei Cloud Gaming. Three of the world's largest cloud gaming services run inside China and almost no Western analyst covers them. Here's what we know.
By Alex Tan - ·7 min read
Cloud gaming is a discovery channel for game purchases nobody is measuring
Cloud subscribers regularly try a game, fall in love, and then buy it on Steam or PSN to own permanently. The flywheel is real, growing, and underexposed in publisher data.
By Marin Björk - ·7 min read
The 60-hour single-player AAA is cloud's best category, not its worst
Conventional wisdom: cloud is for casual snacking. Reality: the long single-player narrative AAA — Cyberpunk, BG3, Elden Ring, Starfield — is the category cloud gaming serves best.
By Kenji Park - ·6 min read
ISP-bundled cloud gaming is the channel the West keeps missing
Chinese carriers bundle cloud gaming with mobile data. South Korean telcos bundle it with fibre plans. In the West, none of the major cloud services have done the same deal at scale. Why?
By Alex Tan - ·6 min read
What if GPU prices collapse — what happens to cloud gaming?
If 2027–2028 brings a real GPU oversupply like the post-crypto crash of 2023, cloud gaming's value proposition shifts. Three scenarios and what we'd watch for.
By Alex Tan - ·7 min read
When should a publisher port to a platform vs just ship cloud streaming?
Cloud streaming gives publishers an option that didn't exist 10 years ago: reach a platform without porting to it. The trade-off is more interesting than the cost-savings framing implies.
By Marin Björk - ·7 min read
Cloud gaming SLAs are about to become a marketing battleground
Cloud gaming services don't currently offer meaningful uptime guarantees. As the audience matures, SLA marketing is going to become a competitive dimension. Forecast for what's coming.
By Alex Tan - ·7 min read
Qualcomm's ARM data centre play is cloud gaming's quiet wildcard
Qualcomm's push into ARM-based data centres has been pitched as an AI inference story. The cloud gaming implications are larger than anyone is marketing, and the timeline is shorter than the consensus thinks.
By Marin Björk - ·6 min read
Holiday gift cloud gaming subscriptions — the December surge nobody markets
Cloud gaming subscriptions are increasingly given as holiday gifts. The category trajectory through 2025-2027 depends partly on this gift cycle that the services haven't fully embraced.
By Marin Björk - ·7 min read
The schools-and-classrooms cloud gaming market is bigger than the industry tracks
Schools and after-school programs are quietly running cloud gaming as a teaching tool. The market is real, the use cases are interesting, and none of the major cloud services market to it.
By Kenji Park - ·6 min read
Will Switch 2 be the device that finally accepts third-party cloud streaming?
Nintendo Switch was famously closed to third-party cloud services. Switch 2 launched in 2024 with the same posture. Whether that holds for the lifetime of Switch 2 is the most interesting unresolved Nintendo question.
By Kenji Park - ·6 min read
GameStop, EB Games, and the cloud gaming retail story
Physical game retailers have spent twenty years adapting to digital distribution. Cloud gaming is the next shift, and the retailer responses tell you something about where the industry is going.
By Kenji Park