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The story
A new service that lets users play PC games for free straight from a smartphone browser has appeared, sparking discussion on 5ch’s gaming board. While word is that the service supports 33 titles and appears to use a one-time purchase model rather than a subscription, skeptics piled on, noting that genres requiring tight input precision — like fighting games — are especially vulnerable to network lag, and questioning whether anyone would want to play for long stretches on a small screen.
What people said
Amazing
You wouldn't call a limited-time free trial "free to play"…
If it's ¥300 or under, it's got a shot
Any more than that and it's a no-go
Game subscriptions just don't catch on in Japan
Sounds like it's a one-time purchase, not a subscription
Come back and tell me once you've bumped that up about 1000x
That's more titles than the PlayStation has lmaooooo
Lol, got played by an obvious troll
It might scratch the itch for a quick session on the go, but would you really want to keep playing on a tiny phone screen once you're back home…?
People mocked it the same way, but video content has already adapted itself to the small phone screen
Well, besides the Sony haters, nobody even owns a PS5 either lol
Once "Toukon" got cracked, the pirate version ran smoother than the devs' own broken official release lol
hahaha you Japanese are nuts! (mimicking a foreigner's broken "Nipponjin" accent)
I wonder which is harder — practicing Rashid's air combos on this, or on the "Lag Station" (a dig at the PlayStation's input delay)
You don't burn through games in volume the way you do movies
Those links only give you a couple frames of leeway, so a phone where you can't even tell exactly when your input registered is nothing but hell
Pretty sure Rashid's non-Rush judo throws only have a 1-frame window too, so it'd be basically unplayable
Funny how you carefully avoid mentioning the "Lag Station"! Full marks for that
Is this for people whose religion won't let them use Game Pass?
Only Xbox fanboys ("hako-goki") even bother with Game Pass anyway
Can't play a single Nintendo game on it
By the way, have you tried it on Game Pass?
Cloud gaming lives and dies by your connection, so if Game Pass has the same problem for you, maybe it's your internet that needs a look
As a fighting game player, a PS5 that restricts your input devices AND still has input lag isn't even on my radar
Full marks, but shouldn't you have said that from the start?
Don't pull that third-rate-writer move of only trashing one side
Even if you can bump the font size up, you can't make it big enough to actually read on a phone screen
And you can't install font-size mods on a cloud service either
Same thing I noticed with the Switch — plenty of publishers just don't bother optimizing for handheld mode
Agreed
Can't say I want to game on a tiny phone screen
Hook up a controller to that and you've got the ultimate setup
This runs in the browser, so it's device-independent
No way something as demanding as Monster Hunter Wilds runs properly through a browser
Huh, turns out "Nintendo fanboys" (buta) can post about something other than trashing Switch and Nintendo after all
Background and Key Points
Cloud game streaming isn’t new to Japan — Sony has run PlayStation Now/Cloud Streaming for years and Microsoft offers Xbox Cloud Gaming through Game Pass Ultimate — but subscription services have historically struggled to catch on with Japanese players, who are used to buying titles outright. That context explains why several posters zeroed in on the “one-time purchase, not subscription” detail as the service’s most interesting feature, and why the ¥300/month threshold came up as the rough ceiling for what a recurring fee would need to be to gain traction here. The 33-title library also needs to be read against PC gaming’s minority status in Japan’s console-dominated market, where owning a gaming PC at all is treated in the thread as a niche, almost tribal identity.
The thread didn’t really argue about whether the service works technically — commenters broadly agreed cloud streaming adds latency — but split over whether that latency actually matters. Casual and story-driven games were seen as fine; fighting games were singled out as the deal-breaker, because competitive titles like Street Fighter 6 (referenced via the character Rashid) rely on single-frame input windows, where even a few milliseconds of added lag breaks combos.
What’s easy to miss is that the “laggy” complaint isn’t about the phone’s hardware — modern phones can run plenty of games locally — it’s about round-trip network latency to a remote server, the same limitation that affects any cloud platform, including PS5’s own streaming features that posters mocked as “Lag Station.” No one in the thread mentioned mobile data usage, which cloud streaming consumes heavily and which would be a real cost factor for anyone actually using this away from Wi-Fi.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Console Wars)) thread “[Great News] PCs Are Now Officially Obsolete — A Revolution Lets You Play PC Games Free on Your Phone.”
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