I feel like PC cafes solve the problem far more efficiently, and more elegantly (with additional side-benefits, like being able to upsell on food, and perhaps even creating social interaction) than cloud-gaming will for a very long time.
It's not clear to me why it never picked up in the US.
But you have to leave your home for a PC cafe, which I know I personally wouldn't want to do if I just want to relax on the couch and play games.
Probably the reason it never picked up in the US is that cities and towns sprawl so much in the US that PC cafes could never be just walking distance down the street from most peoples' homes.
I'd expect them to still appear in dense areas like .. cities .. and you can actually find them (and business seems to be good), but only really in chinatowns and other Asian districts.
And some places are trivially obviously viable, population-wise, like just outside of, or even within, universities (and especially University towns), but PC cafes are still absent, so walking distance doesn't really explain it.
It seems to be more of a cultural issue. It's clearly the best solution for the cash-strapped gamer today and especially so for the last 10 years. Perhaps it simply boils down to the much larger emphasis on console-gaming than PC gaming -- but if that's the case, then cloud-PC-gaming is just as fucked as PC-cafes.
Arcades existed and had their moment in the sun, but as the technology miniaturized and became cheaper, it just made a lot of sense to have in your own home.
This was also true in the asian territories, but PC Cafe's are still a major thing, so that might be part of the reason, but it's not terribly satisfactory.
Particularly since it doesn't fulfill all the same needs as arcades did -- you get the game, but you lose the social aspects, and you lose the ability to play games while outside (and more importantly, for short duration, and for cheap, at least on a per-play basis).
But perhaps general wealth is sufficient to explain the difference.
>I feel like PC cafes solve the problem far more efficiently
For your definition of efficient, maybe. As a strawman, for the father who wants to get in a few minutes of gaming now that the kids are asleep and can't or won't spend the money on a high-end gaming rig capable of playing modern day AAA games, Stadia is the answer. He can start a game in less time that it takes to drive to the nearest pc cafe. Assuming his wife will let him leave to do so. There's no comparison in terms of convenience or efficiency.
The target market isn't really twitch gamers sitting on super-high-end machines playing all hours of the night and naturally they're derisive of Stadia because it isn't meant for them. Stadia is meant for casual / semi-casual gamers who don't want to invest in up to date hardware but still want to play modern games.
If you want to understand why PC Cafes didn't take off I'd argue the reasons are similar to why Netflix, et al have killed the movie theatre industry in the US. At-home convenience is preferred to a communal experience particularly when costs come in to play.
Isn’t the better solution for that just improving game performance. If we can run Skyrim on refrigerators surely triple A companies can get out of their gross 200gb downloads and 16gb of ram usage for their games if properly incentivized...
You can’t really do anything about the asset size. If a character/building/whatever model takes about a megabyte, a thousand models will be a gigabyte. Yes, model sizes used to be smaller, but there was less detail.
As for RAM usage, any data sent to the GPU and back has to come from or land in the RAM. With increasing texture sizes, model detail, etc, all that data has to sit in RAM until it’s sent to the GPU for rendering. But you can’t discard it because you’ll need most of it for the next frame.
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Re: maps: I think FlightGear[0], a flight simulator, gets it right. You can download sections of the world’s terrain and save them to the folder, or you can use a feature (program that runs in the background) called terrasync[1] that downloads and caches the world terrain as needed (in 10°*10° chunks).
It's not clear to me why it never picked up in the US.