The Number of Charting Games Available to Play in the Cloud is Way Up

One of the stats that we track about the cloud gaming ecosystem is the number of games available to play on each cloud gaming service. You can see that chart here any time. Here is the current state

But, we also use the weekly Top Selling games chart in the United Kingdom (UK) to see how many charting games are available on each service as well. The data for the charts comes from the Top 40 list put together from the retail industry group GFK (Growth From Knowledge).

On any given week, 30% to 50% of the listed games are Nintendo exclusives which are obviously (for now) not available to play in the cloud. For example, here is how the week ending in 2023-12-30 looks:

So, in any given week, 20-25 games being playable in the cloud is realistically all we can hope for. Here is how that number has varied over time and by cloud gaming service for the last year or so.

You can see that, at the end of 2023, the number of games on the weekly Top 40 Chart that are available to play in the cloud has been hitting record highs! The availability hit a low of a single game out of 40 in March (after Stadia’s death) but has been as high as 18 in December of 2023!

Why the Increase? PlayStation!

The increase earlier in the year can be explained from Xcloud and GeForce NOW taking up some of the slack that Stadia’s departure left behind (like the loss of FIFA 23 which was later picked up by Xbox Cloud Gaming).

But! The biggest increase near the end of the year is coming from PlayStation Cloud Gaming’s addition of games you can purchase. You can see the PlayStation cloud line went from near zero (when only PS Plus games could be streamed from the cloud) to over 10 per week when purchased games were enabled. While only around 250 additional titles can be purchased from the PS Store and streamed from the cloud, PlayStation has enabled a lot of the right games to be streamed.

In recent months, charting games that can be purchased on PlayStation and streamed from the cloud include Hogwarts Legacy, Spider-Man 2, God of War Ragnarok and more!

The main caveat here is that (for now) these purchasable PS5 games can only be streamed from the cloud to an actual PS5 – negating a lot of the value of cloud gaming.

Xbox Game Pass is Impressive, Too!

If you are an Xbox fan, don’t get too jealous because the ability to stream paid Xbox games from the cloud is still expected to be on the way. For now, though, the orange line in the plot above are cloud games that are available for free as part of Xbox Game Pass. That’s right! Those charting games, each week, are free to play on Game Pass! That makes Game Pass easily the cloud game subscription with the most charting games.

Finally, for nearly a year, Amazon Luna was pinned at an availability of 0 charting games. However, the addition of Fortnite to the service and the release of new Ubisoft games like The Crew Motorfest, AC Mirage and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (all available to play in the Ubisoft channel if purchased or with an Ubisoft+ membership), has got Luna off the ground. Which is great to see.