Cloud PC Services like Shadow PC, AirGPU and CloudDeck support playing just about every PC game in existence on all your devices via the magic of cloud game streaming. This includes on the order of a hundred thousand titles – including those from publishers like Rockstar and PlayStation. But, a number of the most popular multiplayer games in the world (e.g. Apex Legends, EA Sports FC 26 and Marvel Rivals) are unfortunately not supported.
We’ve compiled a list of 27 such titles that are not supported on Cloud PC Services. Unfortunately, they are all pretty popular games.
Why are they not supported?
These games share a common issue that prevents them from being supported: they cannot be run in Virtual Machines (VMs). Virtual Machines are often used by Cloud Service Providers (and even bespoke cloud deployments) to allow them to divide compute resources among multiple customers efficiently. For example, a server blade may have multiple many-core CPUs and multiple server-class GPUs that may support a handful of clients running games or other computer workloads at the same time. Virtual Machines help make this possible – isolating gamers and/or other tenants from each other and giving each user the appearance that they are running on their own standalone box and operating system.
Sounds like a useful abstraction, right? The problem is that some games simply don’t like running inside a Virtual Machine.
Why do some games not support Virtual Machines?
Some games implement “kernel” level anti-cheat system that don’t work in VMs. The “kernel” of an Operating System like Windows or Linux is the core of the Operating System that interacts directly with the hardware. Unfortunately, kernel-level anti-cheat systems typically require access to the host kernel – the kernel that directly interacts with the node’s hardware – rather than a virtualized environment.
Most games with kernel-level anti-cheat systems attempt to detect if you are running the game in virtual machine, throw an error message if you are, and give up. Even if games didn’t attempt to detect VMs, their runtimes would fail due to the lack of host kernel-level access.
Is there Hope for a Fix?
It would take a lot of effort for these cloud services to work around the issue. They’d have to fundamentally change the way they provision CPUs and GPUs for gamers. There are definitely ways to give gamers access to something that is closer to the “bare-metal” hardware and OS that a home PC setup would utilize.
Utilizing modern application “containers” instead of Virtual Machines may get one closer to bare-metal, but typically still limits host kernel access. As you can imagine, providing cloud users with true bare-metal access introduces security complications that require careful handling. It’s not impossible, and some clever Cloud PC like services can potentially work this out, but it certainly is not an easy thing to address.
A number of the games in question are available on services like GeForce NOW and Amazon Luna, however. This is not because the architecture of these cloud gaming services is immune to the issues raised above. Instead, the availability is because the services have made a deal with the publishers (e.g. EA) to be able to deploy special versions of the games that don’t include the anti-cheat software or have their servers whitelisted.
Unlike the Cloud PC services listed above, with GeForce NOW and Luna, users don’t have the flexibility to install software themselves (e.g. aimbots) or tweak the installed games in any way. This lack of flexibility is actually an anti-cheat system in itself! It is tough to cheat using a cloud service like this! Which is likely why EA is willing to allow gamers from these services to play ball.
