but the fact that they didn’t seize this opportunity
honestly, I think they did try, and ran into the unfortunate reality of physics
to make that product work, you need reliable high throughput (this is helped by codecs), sufficient juggle-able GPU space (this is helped by being a gear-hogging first-in-line monopolist), and lastly the casual little requirement of actually being close enough to your customer base
iirc US cost to coast latency is around 65~70ms (so 2x that is the upper timebound for player interactivity, obvs there it'd be less because more local DCs though). just from me to europe is 165msec+, with a far less predictable path throughput. the scale economics to launch a DC for this in ZA (even to serve subsaharan africa all the way up to kenya) just plain doesn't work, and there are many more places in the world where it doesn't
it'll be interesting to see if a retrospective as to why it failed leaks out of that biz someday
for many years, I went blessedly unaware of who this random fuckjack was, knowing only: 1) ambiently knowing the name, 2) that I ambiently know the name (these two things together are usually a decent heuristic for me to not bother digging)
and then I got jumpscared by a full-scale mrbeast standee in a shop some months back
may I soon be able to forget about this fuckjack once again