The big problem seems to be that with current interest rates, breaking into cloud gaming with a whole new platform is just not profitable.
It stopped Google and now it's looking like it's stopping Netflix.
Gamers just don't want to spend money on new platforms or platforms where their friends aren't.
It's a shame to some degree because Stadia was a cheat free paradise. There will always be latency concerns but I think streamed competitive gaming has a future, particularly as kernel anticheat fails to deliver and high end hardware gets more and more expensive.
My wife and I had and interesting pandemic that required a lot of travel unfortunately.
We gamed almost exclusively on Stadia while doing so and it was near flawless. I know it's meme for Google to kill things but man did that one really sting.
GeForce Now, PS Whatever and Xbox Cloud all aren't there when it comes to how immediate Stadia felt. I'll forever be bummed that they didn't hold out for a few more years until mainstream adoption.
Wasn't what stopped google was poor user experience? Trying to prerender all possible frames so there is no lag when user changes direcrion etc on streamed gaming seemed like a waste of resources also.
The user experience on stadia was by far the best cloud gaming experience. They also had the most consumer friendly business model.
What stopped them was interest rate hikes. What their biggest issue before hand was though was bad PR from a questionable launch where a bunch of people were like "but does it work on shitty office Wi-Fi!? No, well this is trash."
Game streaming would not stop cheats, a lot of cheats now work with a capture card and a device that modifies your mouse inputs, you cannot stop that without REALLY good serverside
Maybe the cutting edge R&D of cheats uses that technique; AFAIK it's far from mainstream.
Not to mention entire classes of cheats that require manipulating the rendering engine (e.g., wall hacks) just don't work.
Also with Widevine DRM you can leverage all the crypto crap that the MPAA has forced into our computers over the years and protect the video stream between the GPU and display. That would more than likely screw over 99% of those capture cards.