Believe it or not, game streaming is a technology that’s been kicking around for over 18 years. Yet, somehow, we are still waiting for it to reach critical mass. Google Stadia’s spectacular nosedive certainly cast a long, menacing shadow over the industry, leaving many to wonder if cloud gaming was just a pipe dream.

However, the dream isn’t entirely dead. A few resilient game streaming services are still kicking around the digital ether, and one unexpected (but also expected) player is slowly entering the fray.

 

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Xbox Cloud Gaming

Microsoft went all in on Xbox cloud gaming, banking on the idea that we’d all want to stream top-tier games straight to our phones and browsers. But by all accounts, the ambitious endeavor hasn’t been nearly as successful as Microsoft had hoped. In a bid to get more eyeballs on the screen, Microsoft is now trialing an ad-supported, free tier of the service. Will a free service be enough to entice players? We consider it highly unlikely.

And let’s not forget the recent mass layoffs sweeping through Microsoft; with fewer hands on deck, one has to wonder if there will even be a steady stream of games worth playing to justify putting up with those ads in the first place.

 

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Amazon Luna

Did you know that Amazon has had a game streaming service for over four years now? If you answered “no,” don’t worry—you are definitely not alone. Amazon Luna hasn’t exactly achieved mainstream popularity as of yet; in fact, it’s mostly hovered in the obscurity of a well-kept secret.

To combat this, Amazon is now updating its Fire TV sticks to include Luna gaming directly into the Prime Video app. Now, when you’re endlessly scrolling for a movie to watch on a Friday night, you might just stumble across some cloud gaming instead. If nothing else, at least more people will finally be aware of it now.

 

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Netflix Games

Netflix Games originally started as a curated collection of games for the iOS and Android app stores. Slowly but surely, however, they’ve been branching out into actual game streaming that works on web browsers and set-top boxes running the Netflix app.

They’ve been pretty quiet about it so far, especially compared with the relentless promotion of their original TV and movie content, but that might be changing. Netflix has recently done a large-scale advertising push for Unhinged, an original, short-format horror game. With Netflix’s massive popularity, this sneaky transition may just be the perfect Trojan horse to becoming a prominent game streaming service.

 

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Wrap-up

Game streaming has been around for so long that it’s old enough to vote, but it still hasn’t ever quite caught on with the general public. Perhaps it’s just a technical limitation due to the widely fragmented state of broadband internet in the US. But hey, there’s a silver lining. With the AI boom, we now have massive data centers full of GPUs.

Perhaps when the AI bubble pops, these data centers will be transformed into the largest game streaming infrastructure yet. We can only hope!