The primary issue is the games catalog, something neither Amazon or Google can crack a dent in

Yes. All I want is a latency-optimized EC2 (I'm no twitch gamer, <= 25ms is fine) instance with a decent streaming client on pc/mobile. Let me decide to install steam or epic or origin or whatever and use my own stuff.

This is where NVidia went wrong. They're basically providing that sort of thing, but wanted to present it as their own game service as though all the other storefronts were just backend plumbing. Not a bad consumer experience, but also not what publishers are licensing when they stick their game on Steam.

25ms is a huge ask

Even locally, on a console, you’ll not get latency (input to visible response on screen) down to 25ms these days.

Some LCD TVs alone can add 40-60ms of latency, and software can add another couple of frames. Often 30hz frames, too...

Which kind of sucks if you grew up on CRTs and arcade games that often managed much lower latency.

But I guess it means that game streaming really could offer a console-like experience if as much non-network latency as possible was eliminated...

I believe that's the joke. I wish latency was getting better but every new thing that comes along moves the acceptance further away. Many don't even notice 500 ms delay from click to something actually happening. On my Atari I often had the feeling something started happening before the mouse button was all the way down.

I can't believe that people wouldn't notice 500ms of latency when playing a game. Even 150-200ms is very noticeable.

Sure, in 3D games it's a different topic but I have seen people playing with wireless mouse that lags behind quite significantly without noticing.

It's no better than my normal broadband, which is 10 to 20ms, but I suppose you're right. I've streamed games with up to 100ms without much issue with input lag so I suppose that would be fine, although 100ms would probably be too high for some types of games & multiplayer.

I think you're missing the point: Yes, multiple pieces of equipment in the process adds some ms in between input, computer processing it, and screen outputting it.

The issue here is how much will ping time add to that when streaming a game. Consoles hover in the 100ms are depending on game. PC's it's highly dependent on video hardware, but I good gaming system, display, and keyboard/mouse will be around 70ms.

The issue of streaming game ping ms in part comes down to human reaction time, which averages around 200ms-250ms. Given this, you want a ping time that doesn't add enough latency to the setup to put you above that 200-250ms reaction time, or you start to perceive more noticeable input lag. Given 70-100ms baseline, you want a bandwidth ping absolutely no more than about 100ms on top of that.

The math squares with my personal experience as well. I've played a few streaming services, and when my ping gets to the 100ms area I start to notice a little difference. It's often sill playable, but if it gets higher it can be very distracting.