The gaming industry has trended more towards cloud streaming services like Xbox Cloud Gaming and the PS5's PlayStation Plus Premium, which do away with the conventional need for downloading digital games before playing them. However, you cannot actually own cloud gaming content in the strictest sense because, as a subset of digitally purchased/downloaded content, you can only license it [1]. Even if you do not buy the streaming game as was permitted with the Stadia (more on that soon), you still would pay for the subscription or the title. No payment would erase the reliance on servers the player streams from because otherwise it would not be a cloud game to begin with!
The Google Stadia officially debuted in late 2019 and offered the ability to purchase individual streaming games like the 2016 Doom or to pay a monthly service fee that allowed access to a broader library. Like various other cloud services, Stadia streaming could be accessed from smartphones paired with a wireless controller. The Amazon Luna, launched in 2022, allows game streaming of select console titles through devices like Androids, iOS hardware, and (Amazon) Fire tablets. The Nintendo Switch eShop offers a handful of cloud games at this time. In this case, the Switch itself is the hardware used, whereas the other services could involve miscellaneous devices. Of all of these cloud options listed, the Stadia, the controller of which is pictured below, had its playability come to an end in January of 2023 [2].
Lack of business "traction," as Google put it, had already led to the demise of the Stadia before it had even been out for four years. This brought to pass a key danger for consumers inherent in relying on corporate servers for cloud gaming: there is little to no genuine security that the hardware and whatever software one has paid for will remain usable. For legitimate business reasons or for arbitrary ones, a company could terminate a cloud service, and any money invested into it by the consumer is forfeited—though the company could issue refunds like Google did for some hardware and for any games bought for the system.
Not every company would likely be as accommodating to users, and either way, the software the consumer wanted is retracted from them. Whenever the Switch eShop closes down, there would be no way to redownload non-cloud digital games once deleted. However, any digitally downloaded games that have not been deleted would still be accessible as long as the hardware functions. This is not so with a cloud game for the Switch platform: the moment the servers become inactive, there is nothing you can do to play them even with functioning hardware and an internet connection. The player ultimately paid for ongoing access during the limited time the servers were running even if they never realized this.
Cloud gaming can be implemented or revoked in consumer-benefitting ways, at least as benefitting as a streaming service permits, and even the way Google handled the closing of the Stadia's cloud functionality is a fairly strong concrete example of this. It is just that there is a far lesser degree of ownership and security. You own the hardware and access to a software by direct purchase or by subscription; there is no pure ownership of the title itself. Physical media can be destroyed, decay, or get lost, and digital games have a fixed period of buyability and downloadability before their respective online store would close, though they can be saved on external memory sources or redownloaded up until this point. Cloud streaming is even more susceptible to loss. For its relative convenience with bypassing download waits as well as the need for space to put physical units, it has inescapable boundaries that are not really in the favor of consumers.
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