I don’t think Stadia itself was groundbreaking. Xbox cloud worked as good as Stadia.
But a few yrs in the big players in the cloud gaming industry figured out some critical latency issues around the controllers and optimizing delivery of the video feed. To the point where lag was almost non-existent on a good fiber connection. The datacenter stuff was obviously the core innovation though.
I still prefer to download my Xbox games to my series s/x but I spent a year playing Xbox cloud games exclusively and I could 100% see that being the default for a big part of the casual audience.
But a few yrs in the big players in the cloud gaming industry figured out some critical latency issues around the controllers and optimizing delivery of the video feed. To the point where lag was almost non-existent on a good fiber connection. The datacenter stuff was obviously the core innovation though.
I still prefer to download my Xbox games to my series s/x but I spent a year playing Xbox cloud games exclusively and I could 100% see that being the default for a big part of the casual audience.