I guess the first question is how much people spend.

Millennials spend a fair bit it seems.

$112 a month

https://venturebeat.com/2019/06/06/superdata-millennials-spe...

This makes a console between 2 and 4 months of gaming budget.

A network focused console still requires sone hardware or runs on a pc that costs more than most consoles.

The big benefit would appear to be killing the secondary markets for used games dead which is a hard benefit to sell to your users. It also only saves you money up front as they pretty much must charge more than a console over time to cover their own costs.

Then you have the problem of latency which can only be rendered slightly less crappy with substantial hardware at the isp, unpredictable demand hello covid, and annoying Netflix like account sharing.

The real problem is that the more money your target audience has the better off they would be buying a desktop pc. Nothing up front sounds great to someone who can afford to pay 20 a month but then you can't eat. If someone can pay 99 why not buy a Playstation or pc?

I predict it's a bad idea whose time will never come.

For which X is entrely inappropriate and needs a completely different approach.

So I went back and thought about whether you could extend the X approach to streaming of 3D games. I came up with the following walls:

* Licensing issues * 3D games can max out the PCI bus, network traffic wouldn't stand a chance * How the heck do you keep up with the frames on less powerful hardware? * You'd need a properly portable 3D graphics API

So the White Queen would probably think it's fairly doable before breakfast.