I feel like large companies are pouring money into this with the hope that they will be able to lock users into their cloud offering. However, it is likely they are losing huge amounts of money because of the hardware costs.
Judging by the ones that have gone broke, no.
"Cloud gaming" of the kind where the game runs on a server and the results are sent as video to the client has been tried, on and off, for about five years. Most of the early providers are gone. The trouble is that each user needs an entire server, one comparable to a gamer PC.
Cloud gaming services seem to come in two flavors - expensive, and loss leader.
Shadow PC is in the expensive category. Price is $30/month. When you connect, they launch a server for you and load your environment into it. So you're buying a part-time VM. Apparently you can stay connected as long as you want, although I'm not sure if there's a limit they are not mentioning up front.
NVidia GEForce Now is cheaper. Price is $10/month. You get kicked off after 6 hours. For $17/month, you get a better server with an NVidia 3080 and 8 hours before being kicked off. There's a free tier, where you wait to get in and get kicked off after an hour or two. Originally, the prices were lower, but that was in the loss leader phase. It also helps that NVidia makes GPUs. You can only run games that NVidia has ported to that system.
Google Stadia is $10 a month. Games have to be ported to it, and there's suspicion it may soon join the long list of former Google products.
Vortex's site now says they are no longer accepting new users, and their blog is a Google Stadia ad.
I still play Cyberpunk 2077 on the free tier of Stadia due to a promotion where the game was only $45 and came with a controller/chromecast. Sold the hardware to pay for the game and now I just play with an Xbox controller on whatever computer or phone I'm on at the time.
That's surprisingly inexpensive. The graphics card they promise is nearly $1,000 by itself. For what you'd spend on a DIY build you could probably get 4-5 years of subscription.
'Tim Sweeney described it as “Minecraft meets Left 4 Dead.”'
Is that 6 hours of continuous time, or does it indicate a quota of 6 hours total for the month?
For me, this stuff gets viable when one game studio goes all-in on building a streaming-only game experience that considers all economics of scaling GPUs.
If you reduce visual fidelity enough, you can get away with a lot more clients per host. Hell, depending on how you architect things, you might even be able to serve some clients from servers that dont even have GPUs.
The upsides of cloud gaming are pretty solid if you can get over the caveats. The biggest thing for me would be competitive gaming experiences that are guaranteed to not have any cheaters. That would feel really nice.
Are pods being donated to schools?
This would be a great idea, is to give a pod to a school with management tools etc and teach the kids how to interact with effectively [aws/gcp/azure] mgmt tools to build up a skillset early and accelerate how the yoots understand what cloud is and how its managed.
I follow game development since the 16 bit demoscene days when I used to hang around with crackers, switchers and ProTracker musicians, read Hugi, then I graduate to being a IGDA member, Gamasutra subscriber during its existence, consumer of MakeGames and Develop, attended a couple of GDCE events, having some interviews at well known console manufacturers and eventually deciding that I would rather keep doing boring enterprise consulting than suject myself to game industry working conditions.
Which leaves me with a network of people that are still in the industry, naturally there are opportunities to talk about Stadia and very few of them are impressed with Stadia's track record or its owner long term commitment.
[0]: https://external-preview.redd.it/Ma7bVRkbUuoM4xhzbJFe3qdTzAZ... [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/xcloud/comments/gdp48d/project_xclo...