Typically it means gaming workloads rendered in the cloud, which artificially appears popular at the moment because it comes bundled with game subscription services such as Playstation Plus and Xbox Game Pass - but as Stadia's failure would seem to indicate, nobody wants to pay for a dedicated cloud gaming service. Doesn't seem like a profitable sector of the market.
Nonetheless, my point was that cloud gaming is probably the least concerning part of the merger.
> Stadia's failure would seem to indicate, nobody wants to pay for a dedicated cloud gaming service.
Not so sure about this. Stadia was an odd service - even google's own devices (new google tv for example) didn't support stadia. You had to pay for subscription + a whole game price in most cases.
Combine that with the fact that people already made peace with stadia being shutdown before it even launched - who wants to pay money for a game that can disappear any day.
I had Stadia and played from time to time. I know people who used Stadia exclusively. I play xCloud all the time on my iPad... Stadia had a market, just it being from Google killed it. Well, publishers also played their role there - they wanted consumers to buy games again instead of just giving them access to steam.
Shadow, GeForce Now and Amazon Luna are still alive.
I know it's not your main point, but I need to mention that the failure of Stadia does not indicate the failure of cloud gaming in general but the problem of Stadia itself. There are plenty of other cloud gaming options growing every day.
Eh, most people looking at this don't consider dota 2 in the same bucket as the cloud gaming concerned here. It means Assassin's Creed played on Geforce Now or Forza Horizon played on Xbox Game Pass. My very loose definition is that these are games that usually have a single-player mode are originally intended to be played on a game console, but are run and rendered on cloud services and then transmitted to user (of course you can find lots of exceptions). Dota 2, by contrast, is an "online" game, more specifically MOBA -- this is on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dota_2
Consider dota 2 -- it's a service entirely on the cloud continuously updated.
The list goes on with in terms of aaa games offered by either company where the main offering is actually multiplayer.