They tried it in the early 2000s, when the network throughput and latency just wasn't what it needed to be. Now we have much better networks, more available cloud computing, and a populace that's more used to streaming things. I'm not sure people would accept it just yet, but I don't think OnLive would fail quite so spectacularly now.
Yes, they didn't get going until then, and ended up running... 4 years total?
For strategy games and such, I'm sure streaming will always be viable. As we move into the VR realm, even a tiny amount of latency won't be acceptable. So we're always going to need local rendering for action games.
Games are going to have 100+ gigabyte install footprints later this decade, and terabytes when 8K gets here. Phones, tablets, vr headsets and cheap computers - especially cheap steam boxes - will have to rely on streaming.
The gpu needed to play games on a VR headset doesn't fit on it, thats why they plug into a computer. And for something that fits in a phone/tablet, a 64GB microsd card is $30. 64 GB on something the size of a fingernail for $30. 10 years ago a 60GB 3.5" hdd cost more than that . Storage expands and gets cheaper at a crazy fast rate.
A solution like this is a clever hack, because it's taking advantage of an immense economy of scale provided by a company with really deep pockets operating on a multinational pool of servers that still on balance see a wide variety of different use cases, allowing for a lot of distributed load.
Imagine if every user was demanding that same level. As I write this, Steam is counting over 8 million players logged on. Now imagine trying to imagine trying to guarantee them all gaming-level real time performance (fun note here: that GRID card used for the AMI costs $2,000 alone), and doing it all on a reasonable price.
Even our Amazon hack isn't doing that. 50 cents an hour doesn't sound like much, but the average gamer is putting in 22 hours a week. Some five million enthusiasts are regularly pulling 40. That's anywhere from $40-80 a month. Not to mention the cost of the games themselves.
OnLive was trying to offer this for $15 a month. And originally, they were even footing the cost of the games, aiming for a Netflix/Gametap approach (the latter of which also failed, I might add).
Something like this will only be economical if you really plan on only using it for the occasional single player game a few times a year.
If you use it to play games regularly at even modest frequencies (20+ hours per week), the 50c per hour will quickly start to accumulate and become a recurring monthly bill of $40+.
At that point you might as well invest in a decent gaming desktop and stream from it instead. A i3 + 750 TI based system can match the performance of this setup and would cost less than $500 all-in, which is about the cost of 1 year of streaming from this setup at 20 hrs per week. You'll get a much better experience due to the much lower latency and not having to worry about penny pinching on every session.
Probably not in terms of pure compute power, my wording is definitely a bit off there.
However, the overall gaming experience you get with the local streaming setup will probably be similar to, if not superior to, the remote streaming setup regardless of absolute hardware power, because i3 + GTX 750 TI can definitely handle most games at 60fps in 720p (and a lot of them at 1080p in my experience). So the comparison ends up between streaming 720p with 50ms latency due to bandwidth constraints over WAN vs streaming 720p (and some 1080p) with <5ms latency within a LAN.
According to this, the K520 supports up to 16 concurrent users while sporting 2x GK104 based GPUs of power. When fully utilized I figured each user won't be getting much more power than a single midrange GPU, and I can't imagine why Amazon would choose to not keep them fully utilized either. If you have any sources otherwise, I'd love to see them as well.
Regarding the CPU, when creating an instance you can see this: "G2 instances are backed by 1 x NVDIA GRID GPU (Kepler GK104) and 8 x hardware hyperthreads form an Intel Xeon E5-2670". According to [Intel's product page](http://ark.intel.com/products/64595), the processor only has 16 hyperthreads, so 2 users per CPU. My reasoning may be wrong though, I'm not a virtualization expert at all.
It failed spectacularly.