Up in the Clouds: Explaining Gamer Resistance to Cloud Gaming

Cloud gaming uses servers to stream games over the internet. It has numerous benefits, such as ubiquitous access and eliminating the need for expensive hardware, but many gamers hesitate to adopt it. They instead prefer using their traditional gaming setup, with games stored on their own devices. To establish cloud gaming as a viable alternative to traditional gaming, it is essential to comprehend the reasons behind this resistance behavior. Using inhibitor theory, we analyze interviews with 31 gamers who resist cloud gaming to identify the inhibitors that explain their behavior. We contribute to the stream of resistance research by identifying context-specific and context-independent inhibitors. We extend cloud gaming research that has largely focused on the technological perspective by focusing on a user perspective to explain gamers’ resistance behavior to cloud gaming.