Which made me trust it even less. How is it a sustainable business model for them to run the hardware and platform for the next 10 years without recurring revenue.
For large corporations and companies, it is entirely reasonable to have a couple businesses run red ink which are propped up by other businesses running surplus black ink.
For a non-Google example: Costco and their roasted whole chickens they sell for $5 USD each. There is no fucking way Costco makes a profit, let alone break even, on those, but they do it and run the red ink anyway because the customers that come to buy them will also grab other stuff on the way out, generating black ink to offset and surpass the red ink.
Streaming Netflix is relatively simple - each customer just needs to read a stored stream. I think they even put dedicated servers at edges like ISPs, so it's not even on the public internet!
Streaming a game requires an actual real GPU being (I guess) exclusively used by that customer while they're playing. Not feasible to put those in edge locations.
They could run multiple games per GPU depending on the resolution and how demanding the games are, but yes, it's definitely more expensive than just serving a stream.
Not sure about on the edge, but the problem of gpu allocation isn't a dealbreaker. All the other steaming companies do it and have yet to go bankrupt. Heck, OnLive was doing it ten years ago on much worse hardware and internet.
