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Though I’ve tested some of the best cloud gaming services and have generally found them functional, I couldn’t see myself giving up playing games locally on one of the best gaming PCs or consoles. Unfortunately, a time might come when we all might be forced to play games through the cloud. Why? As the title of this article says, it’s all thanks to the RAM crisis.
My team suggested I write this piece, but I was already thinking about this topic after a recent conversation with a friend. Consoles like the PS5, Xbox Series X and the original Nintendo Switch all now cost more than they did at launch. And as we’re detailing in our ongoing coverage of RAMageddon, the price of components continues to climb. Gaming has never been a cheap hobby, but it’s in danger of becoming unaffordable for the average person.
So what do we do if we can no longer afford gaming machines? It could be cloud gaming. I truly don’t like that proposition, but when you have bills to pay and mouths to feed, paying $20-30 a month to “rent” a gaming PC via the cloud is more palatable than paying hundreds or even thousands for a gaming platform. Let’s dive into the specifics.
The prophetic Bezos statement
The thing that kicked this off for me was a recent article from Windows Central’s Jez Corden, where he discussed an old New York Times interview with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. While the interview is from 2024, it has become rather prophetic given the RAM crisis we’re suffering through. In short, Jeff Bezos believes AI will force you to rent your PC from the cloud.
In that interview, Bezos recounts visiting a brewery that built its own power station to "improve the efficiency of their brewery with electricity." Since there was no power generator, they had to build their own form of electricity. This is a common thing for places like hotels to do, and Bezos said this practice is similar to computation today, as everyone has their own data center.
Bezos believes this won’t last, and that companies are going to buy compute off the grid, as many already do with AWS. This solution can also apply to local PCs. You could have all the peripherals you’d need, such as a mouse, keyboard, and monitor, just not the actual PC. The machine would be a virtual system running in the cloud.
Cloud gaming: An inevitable future?
Playing games exclusively over the cloud isn’t far-fetched, as services like Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Nvidia GeForce Now, and even Amazon Luna already let you play hundreds of titles online. GeForce Now also offers RTX 5080-levels of gaming performance. And if that sounds familiar, it’s because Netflix made streaming movies and shows the norm over physical media years ago. We’re already consuming a lot of our entertainment via the cloud.
Of course, renting a PC to stream games isn’t without its own problems. After all, services like Snapchat, Venmo, Ring, Zoom, and a bunch of others all went down during the AWS outage. When services like Xbox or GeForce Now go offline, customers can’t access their games if they’re running them purely over the cloud. Basically, you’re at the whim of connectivity in situations like this. When these services go down, there’s nothing you can do but wait for them to return.
Let’s also not forget how Nvidia added a 100-hour cap to its cloud gaming platforms. Even if there are no service interruptions, you won’t be able to play games when you’ve reached your time or data limit.
And while $30 a month for Xbox Game Pass is cheaper than paying thousands for a gaming rig, that cost could steadily go up, as we’ve seen when other services like Spotify raise their prices. If cloud gaming is your sole means to play games, you’d have no choice but to pay more when the price inevitably increases. That’s similar to how I grumble whenever Spotify jacks up its price, but continue paying since it’s my primary way of listening to music.
While cloud gaming can be far more affordable and convenient than a traditional gaming console or rig, the cons outweigh the pros, in my estimation. However, given the RAM situation, even I’d have to seriously consider cloud gaming if I can no longer afford systems to play games on. It sucks, but this is the reality we now face.
Bottom line
It’s hard not to get conspiratorial and wonder if this RAM crisis is being perpetuated to make us more dependent on cloud computing. I won’t go further down that rabbit hole, but it’s a shame that the average person is being priced out of gaming because of what’s happening. We’re told that RAM pricing should stabilize in the next year or two. That’s great and all, but it doesn’t help us at the present moment.
Given how people are already used to streaming their movies and music, perhaps it’s time for gaming to fully follow suit. I can see a future where folks look back at this time and think it strange that we bought consoles/PCs and individual games. The way things are going, that future might be here faster than I expected.
One way or another, the way we access and play our games is going to change. Let’s just hope that change yields more positives than negatives.
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