Back in August, Netflix rolled out its cloud gaming beta in the UK and Canada. They then rolled it out to the US in September. As a UK citizen who has tried out the beta, I want to give you my initial thoughts on this beta and the games included. NOTE: This is my first impression of the beta and is not meant to be a comprehensive full review of the final product.
Oxenfree Plays Fine But Molehew’s Mining Adventure Has Notable Lag:
Let’s start with my first point: the lag that you experience will vary from game to game. My wifi allows me to stream games like Halo Infinite on Xbox Cloud Gaming with very little lag; so, my expectations going in were that both games would have lag but would both be playable. Whilst the story-driven game Oxenfree (which doesn’t require split-second inputs) ran rather well during my playtesting, the other game on the beta, Molehew’s Mining Adventure, is a more arcade-style game and the amount of lag I experienced varied. During some runs, the game played almost flawlessly, whilst, during others, it would freeze and not allow you to make your next move for several seconds.
A Larger Selection Of Titles To Test Would Have Been Helpful:
Now, I understand this service is still in beta, but the extremely slim pickings of games do not allow for much lag testing. For those who don’t know: the two games are Oxenfree and Molehew’s Mining Adventure. One of these is a game with very little action, whilst the other is a lot more fast-paced and arcade-like. I would have liked to see Netflix include games of at least two other genres to give players a bigger range to test the lag – a beat ’em up/fighting game and a racing game come to mind as great genres to help test lag.
So How To Improve?
While Netflix Cloud Gaming is still only in beta, there is still a long way to go before Netflix can offer cloud gaming which is to the same level as companies like Microsoft, NVIDIA, Boosteroid, etc. Netflix’s first order of business is to try to minimize lag and up the streaming quality of the games. It is no surprise, as well, that they should then focus on improving the number of games available via their cloud gaming beta. Netflix also needs to continue its global rollout of the beta as a way to test how well the games run across the globe. Personally, the next countries I would roll out the beta to are South Korea, Japan, Australia, and Germany as they are countries with a large number of gamers.
Netflix Cloud Gaming is still only in beta; so, Netflix cloud gaming will definitely improve over time. Hopefully by the time the cloud gaming service is fully rolled out, the streaming experience will be much better.
