I was wrong about cloud gaming. One small setup change showed me the light
I never had much faith in cloud gaming.
The reality of current internet infrastructure and reliability just felt — and in many ways still feels — too far off for streaming to provide a close enough experience to the “real” thing for gamers to accept. I even gave it my best shot to change my mind one year ago this week by committing to only playing games via cloud for an entire week. What I found was that, in my situation, there were only select games where the input delay was tolerable enough to consider it as a primary way to play. It’s a great option for those who can’t get expensive hardware, but it wouldn’t find an audience among the hardcore gamers who have better alternatives.
One year later, I admit that I was wrong about cloud gaming. That’s not because I buffed up my internet speed to better handle the tech. Instead, one small Wi-Fi change showed me what I was missing.
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It goes up to 6
The only meaningful change to my setup between a year ago and today is a new router. It wasn’t my intention to solve this issue when I purchased a gaming router, specifically the Reyee E6 AX6000. I simply needed a new one after my old router bit the dust. I figured I would invest in something that would be future-proof for a while. I had heard of Wi-Fi 6 and how it was supposedly a much more stable connection for gaming, but it wasn’t at the top of my mind when making my purchase.
Because of the nature of my job, I spend a lot of time bouncing between my console and computer working on guides and other coverage of games. After that experimental week last year, I didn’t really try to stream games to my PC for work much. It would be incredibly convenient, but the picture quality would degrade in minutes, and not long afterward, the entire connection would cut and I would have to reconnect
