Logitech’s Steam Deck Killer – Logitech G Cloud Review

This is the Logitech G Cloud, their answer to the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck. It promises a lot, from instant gameplay with a pickup and play style experience, a much lighter design at just 463g – that’s over 30% lighter than the Steam Deck – you also get up to 12 hours of battery life and because the games are all rendered remotely, there’s no fan or overheating to worry about. Sounds perfect, doesn’t it?

Cloud gaming as a concept isn’t exactly new, but for those that don’t know, instead of your game being rendered on your device – like a Steam Deck, the game is actually running on the little processor inside here – the game is rendered on a much more powerful server, and the video is being streamed back to you just like a Netflix stream. The only difference is that your inputs on the controls get sent back to the server to then change what happens on screen, aka you playing the game. 

The catch to this, of course, is that you need an internet connection for this to work – and a good one at that. The better the connection, the better the experience, although if you have, say, an Xbox or gaming PC at your house you can actually stream your games locally so you can enjoy your favourite titles from the comfort of the sofa, rather than only at your PC or console. 

Let’s take a look at this thing up close. Starting with the display, this is a 7” IPS LCD with a claimed 450 nit peak brightness. It’s 60Hz, which matches most streaming services. I used Moonlight to do a bit of display testing, including testing with my Datacolor SpyderX. That reported that this IPS panel covers around 94% of the sRGB spectrum. That’s pretty good – and considerably better than the Steam Deck too. Impressively, at full brightness it actually managed nearly 550 nits of brightness – almost 100 nits higher than their claim which is fantastic. Interestingly it managed a contrast ratio of almost 1400:1 which is pretty good for an IPS panel! Accuracy was impressive too – using the extended accuracy test I saw an average DeltaE of just 1.19, with only a single shade of blue breaking through the DeltaE of 2 threshold. That’s excellent.

Naturally I also used my open source response time tool – that you can now buy over at OSRTT.com by the way – to measure the panel’s response time. Here are those results and.. Erm… yeah. I don’t think I’ve seen that much red on one of these charts before. Now this is technically a little misleading, because the G Cloud’s panel is only running at 60Hz, meaning the refresh rate window is actually 16.7ms. While the average is considerably more than that at 23.5ms, that is under two frames, meaning despite this being as slow as molasses, you shouldn’t actually see much ghosting. It won’t be what you’d call a sharp image at all though, that’s for sure.

Inside you’ve got a Snapdragon 720G chip – that’s a 2020 budget chip you’d find in something like the Samsung A52. It’s not exactly a powerhouse, but if all this thing is meant to do is stream games, it’s perfectly fine – and pairs well with the 23 Wh battery that seems to get around 8 hours or so of screen-on-time. Strangely, you only get 4GB of RAM to go with that though. You’ve got 64GB of onboard storage, and a microSD card slot down at the bottom, next to the USB C charging port and four pole headphone jack. It’s worth noting that the USB C port is only for charging and for things like USB C headphones or adapters – not for display output. You can’t hook this up to a TV to share your games with friends, it’s very much a solo gaming experience. 

Size wise, much in the same way as it’s lighter compared to the Steam Deck, this is much smaller and slimmer too. Its grips are textured for, well, grip, but it follows a much sleeker profile. The triggers at the top for example are markedly thin, and the spacing for the controls is much more akin to a Nintendo Switch than a Steam Deck. Of course, since they didn’t need to fit powerful hardware inside it is considerably, and noticeably lighter. Especially for my wife who did the majority of the testing on this, she found it a much more bearable experience compared to the larger, heavier Steam Deck. 

When it comes to actually playing games, you have quite the selection. The most prominent feature of course is Xbox Game Pass, which includes their Cloud Gaming feature. That means pretty much any game available through gamepass – including Xbox 360 titles – can be played on this. Want to fire up Skate 3 and do a sick front-side 540 shifty tail grab down the super-ultra mega-park deathramp? Right on dude! If you’d rather not pay Microsoft your money, you can sign up for a GeForce Now subscription instead and play the games you hopefully already own through that instead. If that’s not enough you can also install Amazon’s Luna platform, or even stream from a device you already own, like an Xbox or PC, the latter via either Steam Link or Moonlight. 

The actual gaming experience varies quite a lot depending on the game and streaming source you use. My wife enjoyed playing A Garden Story, a cute game where you play as a grape in a 2D action-RPG adventure which played well on the G Cloud, likely thanks to the fact that it’s fairly slow paced and low precision. It’s not too sensitive to latency or the mushy controls on the Cloud. She found the Game Pass to be the best part though – being able to try out any game for as long as she wanted is quite a unique experience, and of course not having to install them either is pretty great too. Impressively, the load in time was pretty short for most titles, although she did find it frustrating to have the video glitch and lag somewhat often. The battery life was excellent – she never felt like it was out of charge and only needed topping up every couple of days. 

On the latency front, this is where things get interesting. As an absolute best case scenario, using Moonlight to stream from a desktop locally, OSRTT reckons you’ll have around 58ms of latency on average. Now that isn’t the absolute worst – I’d call that slow but relatively playable, and considering that it’s a 60Hz display anyway, that sort of latency is incredibly common among console devices, including the Steam Deck. I wouldn’t want to try any competitive or rhythm games with it, but for anything casual that’s fine. 

From a streaming service though? Oh boy that’s bad. NVIDIA’s GeForce Now service seemed to perform the best for me, averaging around 155ms when switching cameras in Art of Rally. For context, the Steam Deck takes around 60ms to do the same action. That’s not far off a third of the time – or put it the other way, the G Cloud streaming from GeForce Now is almost three times slower. That makes a huge difference – trying to steer in Art of Rally was almost impossible as you can’t accurately control how much you’ve already turned and end up hunting back and forth just trying to stay in a straight line. This is the perfect console style game to play on this, but with this much lag it isn’t exactly a great time.

When it comes to Xbox Cloud Gaming… It’s so, so much worse. Playing Skate 3, just to have your character get on or off their board took an average of around 355ms to START registering. For some context here, that is almost TWICE my standard reaction time. As in, I could react to a visual stimulus TWICE in that time. If you thought trying to steer with 150ms of latency was bad, just wait until you double that and then some! There was no way I could complete any challenges with this. Sure you can try tricking around if you want, but trying to accurately steer down a ramp or time a lateflip just wasn’t possible.

Now you might argue that because this is an Xbox 360 emulated game, and that might be adding some more latency than native PC titles would see, and sure, you are right. Playing Forza Horizon 5 via Xbox Cloud Gaming was faster, with an average input latency of… 235ms. Yeah, almost 100ms slower than GeForce Now, and FOUR TIMES SLOWER THAN STREAMING LOCALLY OR PLAYING ON A STEAM DECK. To say this was impossible to play with any level of enjoyment would be an understatement. 

Of course, the elephant in the room here is the versatility that most handheld consoles offer is distinctly lacking in the G Cloud. Because of its tethered nature – either to your own network, or to the internet at large – anywhere that doesn’t have a rock solid, fast, connection means this is practically useless. Sure, you can play Android games, but guess what? So can your phone. If you want to game on a road trip, you’re out of luck. Want to let your kids have a distraction at their gran’s house which only had an ageing ADSL 2 Mbps connection? That’s not gonna work either. And let’s say you’re travelling, and the hotel you’re staying at has painfully slow WiFi. Welp, looks like your portable games console doesn’t work. 

The obvious contrast to locally rendered consoles like the Steam Deck or Nintendo Switch is that they’ll work just fine without internet at all. Sure, especially on Steam some games are picky about having a connection for DRM, but ANY connection would work fine there. Hotspot from your phone, if it really needs it, although 9 times out of 10 you wouldn’t need to even think about it. 

The local-play nature also means you avoid all latency issues – it’s playing right there on the device, so yeah it’s going to be pretty much instant. Sure, you do need to deal with the heat and noise on something like the Steam Deck, but when the latency is under a tenth as much that makes a huge difference to the gaming experience. It goes from practically unplayable to perfectly fine. 

When it comes to the library, while Game Pass seems like a limitless source of titles, you don’t actually own any of them. If you have to cut your expenses down for a few months, and you decide that the ongoing subscription to Game Pass is one you can live without, well on the G Cloud you now don’t have games to play. If you’d bought them on Steam then you could still play them – assuming you had a PC on your network to game on, otherwise you’re still stuck paying a subscription to NVIDIA instead. 

There is also a limit to what titles you can find on Game Pass. Want to play Cyberpunk 2077? Sorry, that’s not in the library. Shadow of the Tomb Raider? Sorry, that’s not in the library. Grand Theft Auto 5? Sorry, the best we can do is PAW Patrol: Grand Prix. Rust? War Thunder? Euro Truck Simulator 2? Sorry, nope. Now this isn’t a problem on a PC or a console like the Steam Deck or ROG Ally because you can just play those games locally through Steam. I mean you can do that too on the G Cloud, but you’ll have to fork out another £9 or £18 per month to play those games – that you still have to buy on Steam mind you – via GeForce Now. 

Something that I find starkly missing that I love so much about the Steam Deck is emulation. The Deck isn’t the most powerful console in the world, but it can still play games from almost any console – it can even do PS3 games with the right tweaks! It’ll run Xbox 360 titles if you install Windows to a microSD card, and of course it’ll do Switch, Wii and GameCube games too. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time with my Deck playing a load of different Pokemon games. That’s not possible on the G Cloud – save for an Android emulator for Gameboy games which thanks to the budget CPU wouldn’t be the best experience and would definitely get the better of the battery too.

I don’t think I can quite emphasise just how much I dislike subscription services. Being beholden to someone like Microsoft to not only let you have access to a game library, but to actually run those games, means if you can’t afford the fee, you lose access. If Microsoft decides – much like Google did with Stadia – that Game Pass Cloud Gaming just isn’t worth it for them, then this becomes e-waste. Sure, you could move over to GeForce now, but then you’d have to buy the games through platforms like Steam on top of the new subscription service fees. If you are using this purely to stream locally then awesome, more power to ya, although for considerably less money you could get a cheap android tablet and a controller grip which would perform pretty similarly.

Again, the obvious contrast here is the local-play devices like the Deck that don’t have any ongoing fees. Games are on sale a whole lot, so you can pick up a year’s worth of games for a handful of months worth of subscription fees – and that’s not to mention emulated titles. Equally, if you are the sort of person to buy a Steam Deck or ROG Ally, you already have a healthy games library on platforms like Steam, which are all yours to play whenever and wherever – so long as Valve exists, I guess. 

While the NDA that I signed when Logitech offered me this G Cloud to review – and provided me a code for both GeForce Now and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate – means I can’t show you the slide deck they gave me, I can tell you that Logitech views the G Cloud as a AAA and Hardcore game machine. They say that a Steam Deck costs AT LEAST $449 but could be over $1000, not including 4 $60 games you’ll obviously have to buy. And, you know, when you compare that to the $350 for the G Cloud and $15 per month for Game Pass Ultimate, that’s only like $529. For the first year. Then another $180 per year. And another $180. And another. And that’s assuming you ONLY pay for Game Pass! Honestly that slide really rubbed me the wrong way and I’m sorry I can’t show it to you.

But I think that highlights what Logitech thinks this thing is. They see it as a new space to occupy where ‘gaming is in the cloud maaaannn’, and their glorified Android tablet with a controller built in is the gateway to that new paradise. Sure, the fact that it’s not locked to any one platform is good for the whole Stadia-like shutdown problem that has plagued the game streaming industry for two decades – if you are too young to know about onLive, go look it up – but it also means that the device itself isn’t inherently all that special. Sure, their fancy launcher dashboard is nice enough – I mean there is no app switching, it closes your games if you even accidentally brush the lock slider at the top and you have to know to press the Y button to close an app to get it to reboot, but hey it looks cool. But beyond that skin, it’s a budget Android tablet. It’s way too small for me personally. It’s actively uncomfortable for me, and my god the triggers at the top are anaemic. The spacing between the right joystick and the ABXY buttons is too small for my larger hands, although of course all of that is subjective and based on your hand size. The Steam Deck fits me like a glove, sadly this doesn’t.

There’s also the whole latency problem – in a game like Skate 3 I couldn’t play it properly. Trying to accurately aim my character when it takes almost half a second to register any change in movement is just impossible, and that sort of issue was common across pretty much every game. We also had video bitrate issues – like everything would be fine then the image would turn into a pixelated mess for a bit, then go back to normal. There’d be weird glitches like this where a large part of the frame would stick, bug out or just completely break. All from Xbox Game Pass Ultimate too. 

To be clear though, if services like Xbox Cloud Gaming work for you, I have no problem with that at all. While they don’t make much sense for me, I know that a lot of people enjoyed Google Stadia for the convenience factor alone, so if they fit your needs that’s fantastic. My problems are with the services, not the users. 

The fact that this lacks the ability to output to a TV makes it even less appealing. I’ve spent just as much time playing games with my friends and family on my TV with my Steam Deck as I have playing solo. I’ve spent plenty of time playing group Switch games on the big screen too – always a good time. None of that is even possible with this. It’s more like a Switch Lite, but that’s almost half the price now! And it works when travelling! 

Realistically, I don’t think that the Steam Deck and the G Cloud are comparable devices – they don’t offer the same experience or much in the way of overlapping use cases. Sure, they are both handheld devices you play games on, but that’s about it for similarities. The Steam Deck is basically a PC in a handheld game console format. It can dock and be a desktop, offer a friends and family big screen gaming experience, or be a solo game machine. It can play anything on Steam, and with a little work can play games from almost any games console, and even platforms like Epic can work too. The G Cloud lets you stream games from cloud services, in the same way a laptop with an xbox controller, or an Android tablet with a controller grip would. 

If it’s not obvious, I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of the G Cloud. Cloud gaming in general seems like a bit of a fad to me anyway, and having to pay even the currently discounted $300 price tag is way too much for basically the same functionality as downloading the Xbox Cloud Gaming app on your phone and buying a Razer Kishi V2 controller grip. The Steam Deck is special because Valve made it. The ROG Ally is special because of the hardware inside it. The G Cloud, well it just isn’t special.