Cloud Wars in Gaming

I still have my Ocarina of Time cartridge somewhere in a box.

Also Chrono Trigger, if you know you know. (And if you don’t know, we need to have a serious conversation about JRPGs and time travel.)

I haven’t touched either in years, but I keep them around. Sentimental value, sure. But also because they’re mine. I bought them. I own them. Twenty years from now, I can dust off an old console and play them exactly as I remember.

That feeling seems quaint now.

Most of my current library lives on my PS5 subscription and Steam. I can’t remember the last time I bought a physical game. Everything’s digital and tied to an account somewhere.

And honestly? It’s been fine.

I’ve replayed The Witcher III enough times to see every ending (Team Yennefer, don’t @ me). I’ve got a copy of Dark Souls that I know I’ll never finish because I just can’t deal with how soul-crushingly hard it is, but it sits in my library like a monument to my own limitations.

I still feel like I “own” these games, even though they’re just licenses attached to my PlayStation Network and Steam accounts.

But here’s the thing: Where gaming is headed, I might not even get that illusion of ownership much longer.

Cloud gaming is the future, they tell us. Microsoft, Sony, Nvidia, Amazon. They’re all betting billions on it. No downloads. No hardware. Just stream any game to any device for a monthly fee.

Sounds convenient.

Until you realize what you’re actually paying for: Temporary access to games that will disappear the moment you stop paying. Or the moment the company decides to shut down the service.

One Google Stadia player found this out the hard way when the service shut down in 2023. He lost 6,000 hours of progress in Red Dead Redemption 2 overnight.^[1] Not because he stopped paying. Not because he did anything wrong. Because Google decided cloud gaming wasn’t profitable enough.

That’s three years of full-time gaming, erased.

And the companies now fighting for the $122 billion cloud gaming market? They’re not solving this problem. They’re making it worse, while charging you $30, $40, even $50 a month for the privilege.

So yeah, I’m holding onto those old cartridges.

Because I’m starting to think they might be the last games I actually own.

How ‘Buying’ Stopped Meaning Ownership

Cloud gaming isn’t new. The technology has been around for years. But lately, the moves these companies are making suggest they’ve stopped asking if this is the future and started acting like it’s inevitable.

Microsoft overhauled Game Pass in October, raising their Ultimate tier 50% to $30/month and pushing cloud gaming across all subscription tiers ^[2]. Sony expanded cloud streaming to the PlayStation Portal in November, giving users access to 2,000+ games without a console ^[3].

The experimental phase is over. Now they’re going all-in.

The market was worth $9.71 billion in 2024. It’s projected to hit $121.77 billion by 2032 ^[5]. That’s a 33.9% annual growth rate. That’s why everyone suddenly cares about cloud gaming.

But here’s what none of these companies want you focusing on: The entire concept of ownership is disappearing.

When I bought Ocarina of Time in 1998, I paid once and owned it forever. When I bought The Witcher III digitally, I at least got a license that felt semi-permanent. It’s tied to my PSN account, and Sony probably isn’t shutting down anytime soon (fingers crossed).

But when you subscribe to cloud gaming? You own nothing. You’re paying monthly for the privilege of streaming games that live on someone else’s servers. Stop paying, and your entire library vanishes. Company shuts down the service? Your library vanishes. Licensing deal expires for a game you love? You get the picture.

This isn’t hypothetical. Google Stadia shut down in January 2023 after less than three years of operation ^[6]. The bigger lesson? Stadia failed despite being backed by Google, one of the richest companies on Earth with world-class infrastructure. If they couldn’t make cloud gaming work, what makes you think the current players have it figured out?

That’s the core issue at the heart of this $122 billion battle: Cloud gaming is being built on a business model that makes your gaming investments inherently temporary.

And judging by Microsoft’s 50% price increase, Sony’s aggressive cloud expansion, Nvidia’s AI priorities, and Amazon’s complete lack of traction (they managed maybe 270,000 users despite having 220 million Prime subscribers ^[7]), these companies are more interested in maximizing subscription revenue than solving the ownership problem.

If our comprehensive guide to how cloud gaming works taught us anything, it’s that the technology can be impressive when conditions are right. Get close enough to a data center with a solid internet connection, and cloud gaming delivers what it promises.

But the business models being layered on top? Those are designed to lock you into paying forever while giving you nothing you can actually keep.

So why does this matter if you’re not even using cloud gaming yet?

Because this is the direction the entire industry is moving. Physical games are disappearing. Digital ownership is already shaky. Cloud gaming is the logical endpoint: monthly payments that never stop, for games you’ll never own.

And once that becomes the norm, your Ocarina of Time cartridge starts looking less like nostalgia and more like the last relic of a time when “buying a game” actually meant something.

The Big Players Making the Push