How the Main Game Streaming Services Compare

Cloud gaming spent a decade being described as almost ready. It’s now genuinely usable on a decent connection, which means the conversation has moved on from whether it works to the much more consequential question of what each service lets you play.

That’s where they differ most, and it matters far more than the latency figures.

The three models

GeForce Now runs your own library on someone else’s hardware

Nvidia’s service streams a full gaming PC that runs games you already own on Steam, Epic and other storefronts. You’re renting the machine, not the games.

The Ultimate tier sits at around €20 a month and runs on RTX 5080 class servers, reaching up to 5K at 120 frames per second, and it’s the only service in this comparison that goes beyond 1080p60 in any meaningful way. Latency is the lowest of the group.

The catch is publisher permission. Rights holders have to opt in for a game to be streamable, and several notable publishers have pulled their catalogues over the years. Owning a game doesn’t guarantee you can stream it, so check the supported list for the titles you actually play before subscribing.

Xbox Cloud Gaming streams the catalogue

Bundled with the premium Game Pass tier at around €20 a month. You stream from the subscription catalogue rather than from a library you own, plus a growing set of titles you’ve purchased separately.

It caps at 1080p60, which is the right decision for reliability and a real limitation if you’re streaming to a large television. The strength is that it needs no hardware at all, running in a browser and on phones, televisions and handhelds.

Pricing on this tier has been volatile. It rose sharply last year and was subsequently walked back after significant subscriber pushback, so check the current figure in your region rather than assuming.

Amazon Luna is the cheap one, now simplified

Luna has changed shape considerably. Amazon retired most of its storefront and consolidated the service into a single subscription at around €10 a month, making it comfortably the cheapest of the three.

It also caps at 1080p60. The library is smaller and the model is built around bundled channels of games rather than a single unified catalogue. For casual and family play at half the price of the others, it’s a reasonable proposition. As a primary way of playing, it isn’t.

What you need for it to work

Bandwidth is the least important of the three requirements, which surprises people.

• Bandwidth of roughly 15 to 25 Mbps for 1080p60, more for higher tiers. Most connections clear this easily.
• Latency to the data centre, which is the one that decides whether it feels good. Under 40ms is fine for most games. Over 80ms is noticeable in anything fast. Distance to the nearest server is the deciding factor and you can’t change it.
• Connection stability, the real killer. A connection that averages excellent figures but drops packets intermittently produces visible artefacts and brief freezes. Wired ethernet is dramatically better than wifi here, and this single change fixes most complaints.

Every service offers a trial or a free tier. Use it to test your specific connection before paying for anything, because the variable that determines your experience is entirely local and no review can tell you what it will be.

What streaming is genuinely good at

Turn-based, strategy and narrative games play essentially perfectly. Slower action games are fine. Single player shooters are acceptable to most people. Competitive shooters and fighting games are the ones where the added latency is a real disadvantage, and no service currently solves that.

The strongest use case remains playing on hardware that couldn’t otherwise run the game: an old laptop, a television, a phone with a controller clip. Used that way it’s remarkable. Used as a replacement for a capable gaming PC, it involves compromises that a capable gaming PC doesn’t.

Picking one

If you already own a large PC library and want to play it on weak hardware, GeForce Now is the only service that does that job. If you want a catalogue with no hardware at all and no existing library, Xbox Cloud is the most complete. If cost is the deciding factor and the library is enough, Luna is half the price of either.