These are supported by a wide range of devices and come with various monthly price tags. No matter your budget or needs, one of these five should fit the bill. Here’s a comparison of all the listed cloud gaming services, considering their pricing, gaming library size, and supported platforms.
At $20 a month (But often available for less through promotional pricing during seasonal sales events), Xbox Game Pass Ultimate isn’t the cheapest service, and you are limited to streaming games in the Xbox library. But the overall service and streaming experience is top-notch and very hard to beat. If you spend more time playing PlayStation consoles, PlayStation Plus is the perfect cloud gaming service for you.
You can play your favorite games on the highest settings, as games are streamed directly from NVIDIA’s powerful GeForce RTX GPUs. Cloud gaming on PlayStation 4 and 5 requires a PlayStation Plus Premium subscription. With the subscription, you can stream games not just on PS4 and PS5, but also on Windows machines. Since many of the games offered through PlayStation cloud gaming are console or PlayStation exclusives, this makes it an attractive way to play games on PC that are otherwise not available natively. Xbox cloud gaming requires a subscription to Xbox Game Pass to play.
How Does Cloud Gaming Work? Explained In 2025
With companies such as Nvidia, Microsoft, Sony, and others having entered the the cloud gaming arena, it’s now easier than ever. Cloud gaming has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years and the prospect of gaming anywhere on any system devoid of the hassles of updates and patches makes for a really appealing service. It’s pretty fair to say that Microsoft is unrivaled in the cloud gaming service sphere. Not only does it allow you to back up your games, but it also gives you a huge library of games on Xbox, PC, and even mobile devices. If you’re somebody who recently purchased an Xbox Series S and doesn’t have many (or any) games yet, this is the perfect way for you to become acquainted with everything that the console has to offer. Because games are an interactive medium, cloud gaming needs to process your inputs.
You can use it to store anything (movies, music, photos, files, etc.), but most notably, you can use it to store and play your games. We’ve picked out our choices for the best cloud gaming services, from Game Pass to GeForce Now, to provide a handy entry point to the cloud gaming world. On top of that, many services offer support for a vast selection of free-to-play games like Rocket League or Path of Exile.
In addition to ease of use, PlayStation Plus gives you a few free games every month, special deals, and cloud storage. Even if you don’t plan on playing the free monthly games immediately, you’re allowed to download them (either to your console or into cloud storage) and play them later. It offers high-quality gaming without expensive hardware, making it a cost-effective solution for many, provided they have a solid internet connection. Services like airgpu or Shadow PC, which offer 4K streaming, might be the best fit if you have a 4K display. If you’re into competitive or fast-paced gaming, finding a service with low latency and input lag is a must.
There are currently three major front runners of cloud gaming, but we expect several others to offer stiff competition in the not-so-distant future. Although it’s expensive, Shadow is a great option for some gamers. Anyone who doesn’t want to worry about maintaining a gaming rig or doesn’t want to drop $1,000+ on a prebuilt system will love the power Shadow offers.
Xbox On Pc
To know which cloud gaming service is the best, you will have to consider the gaming platform that you’re using. For PC, NVIDIA GeForce Now is the best; for Xbox, Xbox Cloud Gaming is the best; and for PlayStation, PlayStation Plus is the best. Once the gameplay is recorded, it’s converted to video and audio signals. Afterward, the video and audio signals are delivered to your computer or console via an internet connection.
Online Games – Play Anywhere, Anytime
Streaming a game from the cloud also requires a considerably higher bandwidth than simply streaming movies or music, which increases based on the resolution. This can make streaming on the go far from ideal if you don’t have a reliable 5G service or are using a public Wi-Fi connection. So while gaming on the go is usually an attractive selling point of cloud gaming, some may find it preferable to just being able to play games anywhere in your house or with a wired Ethernet connection. Cloud gaming has had a tricky development for well over a decade but technological improvements. At a time when money is tight for many households, it’s making gaming more accessible, provided you do have a strong internet connection. The non-console cloud gaming is strictly for PCs and only for a small subset of the catalog (and they’re all PS4 or earlier games), via an app.
Additionally, we would compare the cloud gaming experience to just playing the same game locally on the test rig to see if anything did feel notably off. The results are subjective and are likely to be more noticeable for more experienced players, especially in the competitive gaming space. Nintendo Switch Online is one of the cheaper cloud gaming services and is a good option for anyone who doesn’t want something too fancy. This service will back up your games to the cloud, giving you the peace of mind that your files are safe (which will be comforting to anyone who’s ever lost an Animal Crossing village before).