$0.50 an hour only amounts to 200 hours of gaming for the price of a rig capable enough to play games at qualities that are going to be streamed. That plus $0 for Hamachi ($50/year if you need more than 5 computers on the network) works pretty well. I've tried Paperspace, and the performance was about the same. I will say that the Shadow streaming service I thought was superior to all other options I tried, but also far more expensive for not enough of a difference.
It might make sense for some people, I'm not saying that everyone should do this.
My son's young enough that he still goes through phases. That and he leaves every summer to go to his grandparents'. Sticking with cloud gaming gives me the freedom to just throw everything away or stop using it for long periods of time without guilt.
Also, it honestly makes me feel better to know that I didn't buy a bunch of fancy hardware to to use 3.6% of the time. AWS rents the hardware out to somebody else when I'm not using it, and is strongly incentivized to get its utilization as close to 100% as possible.
