I live in London, so probably not far from the GCP data centre, I have a 50mb connection (pretty average and affordable for London) and I don't see myself ever investing in a console or gaming PC again.

My gaming experience with Stadia is better than "good enough", and that's all that matters. If they can get the good titles, they have me as a customer.

I would settle for a lower quality service than I'm currently getting before I think about buying my own hardware again.

Shooters are out, skill based games (e.g. rocket league) are out, racing games are much harder due to latency as well and quite a few platformers become an infuriating experience.

Slower paced games work just fine but until the latency gap is closed or until games will be designed with it in mind Stadia is dead in the water as far as i concern, 5+ frames of latency at 60fps isn’t a good experience.

At the risk of being called a ludite or a peasant, may I suggest most people don't actually care that much about reaching the height of visual fidelity, at least in this aspect?

The reality is this same argument could be made against any kind of video streaming. But the reality is that people are pretty satisfied with the fidelity that video encoders can produce. Yes, it will always be inferior in several respects to the uncompressed, ~33Gbps 3840x2160@60hz your local rig can push out, but will it be a deal breaker for everyone, or even most people? I don't think so, personally.

I believe what you’re describing is a feature of Thunderbolt, not DP.

I use MST with a mini display port hub for more outputs on my laptop.

Displayport isn't even available on displays or GPUs.

These services use hardware acceleration for encode and decode of the video to H.264 (perhaps HEVC as well)

Clearly the bandwidth requirement is lower.

3840 x 2160 x 120 x 10 x 3 = 29,859,840,000

That's not even 40Gbps

35gbps

But my point still stands. Streaming doesn't need such a high bitrate

How many people play Minecraft?

edit: There's a population that cares about graphics, but the population that doesn't is bigger and collectively has more money. Just look at the mobile gaming market.

Also DisplayPort 2.0 bandwidth is mostly for supporting VR where visual artifacts and low fidelity lead to motion sickness for a huge demographic.

I only fear latency, which is what makes games unplayable to me... I live in Argentina and the best ping I can get on Fortnite is 50ms, using servers in Brazil. There are few territories with low ping in the world.

Sure, VR might one day be a big part of the gaming market. It won't be soon, and it will probably never be the entire market.

They notice with their wallets. A battlestation capable of 10-bit color, 240Hz, at 4K, for a single graphics generation, costs more than a monthly subscription service.

Google generally operates with 5+ years of foresight. If you think at all that cloud gaming will become viable in the next 5-ish years then you should not ignore or rule out any cloud gaming platforms as unreasonable.