It is a sad time in the world of online gaming as cloud gaming subscription service Utomik has announced that they are closing their doors. This puts an end to the company that only formed back in 2022, but already offered a huge library to choose from as and when you liked.

There wasn’t a concrete reason given for this in the official announcement, but then when is there really? The company simply say they “fought long and hard” but it “was not enough”. It is quite a shame. Whilst they may not have stocked a big selection of Triple-As, their indie offerings were quite substantial.

Unfortunately, the demise of Utomike can probably be blamed on the likes of Microsoft, Sony, and Nvidia, which are beefing up their offerings in the cloud arena. I imagine it is quite difficult when you have the likes of Game Pass hosting their day-one launches, or Plus delivering that nostalgia hit with their backlog of classics.

Just to go off on a little bit of a tangent here; by god, GeForce NOW is just awful. Not their catalogue, but the fact that you can only rent a virtual machine for a certain amount of time before you get booted off. Yes, you can immediately reconnect but say goodbye to all that progress in that inevitable boss battle you'll find yourself in when it expires.

We can’t really mention cloud gaming without discussing the practice in general. Personally, I am not a fan of it. I subscribe to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and use it regularly, but I really dislike that at any moment your favourites could be taken away. Plus, who doesn’t love looking at their bookcase full of game boxes? 

According to data from GlobalData, as reported by Pocketgamer.biz, I am not alone in these misgivings. Only 6% of people had a cloud service subscription back in 2023. However, the report also says that subscribers will rise from 184 million in 2024 to 687 in 2040, which sounds absurd. And probably not if places like Utomik get shut down.