They need to show something shiny to hide the fact that the system has 100ms of latency on a test environment.

I wonder how much lag the style transfer would add

100ms+ feels worse in this kind of thing compared to 100ms ping to a multiplayer server because even if you have bad ping to a server the game still records your inputs locally and feels responsive. More realistically it will be more like 180ms+ on a home connection.

I was an OnLive user when it existed earlier in the decade and I would say that it felt generally fine in games with forgiving timers that were not all that hard. In any game that is challenging, this kind of lag even in single player games can be very frustrating, and you might as well not even think about multiplayer because it will be a much worse experience than playing on a 56K modem in the late 1990s.

The old Assassin's Creed games were a great fit for the technology because nothing required a reaction time of under 1000 ms and movement did not require a lot of fine adjustments. Anything turn based is also a great fit for this kind of technology.

Even Steam Link wireless in the same house over a good router has annoying input lag that may not be immediately noticeable until you compare it to a wired connection or using the PC itself.

Another big issue with this in the US is that only rich people are going to have the quality of connection you would need to enjoy this at good quality. And if you are rich, spending like $1k on a budget gaming PC or a few hundred bucks on a console are going to be pretty reasonable. No one would be dumb enough to spend $300/month+ on a high bandwidth connection so that they can stream games to potato hardware.

On the other hand, if high bandwidth connections were ubiquitous in the US as they are in some other developed countries at an affordable price, the calculus would be totally different.

You are totally right about the turn based games.

I used a game streaming service called Shadow, and it works amazing for Sim City, Frost, and Civilization type games.

I really hope Google focused on putting out quality titles in the city builder genres. Hell it might even make sense if they outright bought the Civilization franchise.

I would love to play a turn-based strategy like Rome Total War using this. Games like that are perfect for 20 minute chunks of gameplay on a bus/train, in the airport, waiting somewhere.

> No one would be dumb enough to spend $300/month+ on a high bandwidth connection so that they can stream games to potato hardware.

I'm paying $80/mo for nominally gigabit (usually tests out at 700+Mbit from the router, a bit lower for WiFi clients) with no bandwidth cap, and not in a market with much (or any) competition for really high-speed connections. What are people paying $300+/mo for, and is even remotely needed for something like this?

That's great for you and that is what it should cost but for a large portion of people that kind of bandwidth is not attainable for an affordable price.

Style Transfer might be a way to paper over lag for some connections and some types of games? It might be better to have local ML-interpreted "pretty" screens than the usual rain fade/digital tears of struggling-to-keep-up-with-the-action video codec?