Asher Kagan, the CEO of Blade, shared his thoughts on the fundamentals of how cloud gaming should be set up. He writes of the term “Netflix of Gaming” and how that’s bad for cloud gaming.

We’ve also seen a rise in conversation about the creation of a “Netflix of Gaming,” a catch-all of sorts where players can choose from a catalog of games on demand for a single flat price. While that sounds like a positive proposition for gamers, it in fact may do more harm than good and actually be a disservice to the industry and to players.

He goes on to bring up several good points on why we should avoid this term. For one, there is the fundamental difference between the tech to stream video and the tech to stream games or pc apps in general. Once you think about it, that statement makes a lot of sense. With streaming video, you have video footage and don’t have to worry about actively rendering the footage, so the hardware requirements are far less.

With that stated, we can see his reasoning for his stance that cloud gaming isn’t really about the content being streamed, it’s the removal of the barrier of high-end gaming hardware.

With a cloud gaming service, you don’t have to buy an expensive computer, figure out how to configure it, learn about graphics cards, memory, hard drives, processors, drivers, etc.. Instead, you sign up, load up your Steam, Battle.net, Origin, or whatever accounts you already own, and start playing.

He then later goes on to state that with video streaming we now have the issue that to get your favorite content we need to subscribe to a growing number of services, with even more on the horizon!

Treating cloud gaming as a sea of content split among a number of different providers can lead to fragmentation within the community. It’s something we’re already noticing today, what with the proliferation of video streaming services (and cloud subscription services). And it’s only getting worse. It’s a lot to ask consumers to have to juggle between a handful (or more) services to get the content they want.

With all said, I think he made great points throughout the article. I believe a more accurate comparison to Netflix in the gaming world is Xbox Game Pass or Origin Premiere. We do have services though like PlayStation Now that offers both the software and hardware. What do you think is better for cloud gaming? Leave your thoughts and comments below!

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