Olga Weis
Last updated Oct 27, 2026
Hi! I'm Olga Weis, a technical writer for Electronic Team, Inc.
If you're visiting this page, there are two possibilities. Either you're wondering why anyone would game on a cloud PC, or you've already tried it, and are hungry for more - with a gamepad this time.
Either way, you'll learn something new in this article. Enjoy!
Skip this part if you're here for the guide.
Have you heard the term "RAMmageddon"? I saw it a few times while looking for a source on RAM price hikes (I did find a good one). Figures aside, I think it explains itself pretty well.
So, gaming PCs are becoming an unaffordable luxury. But cloud PCs lag a lot, right? Wrong! This user poll from 2022 has a decent sample size (over 200!), and shows that the majority of participants have a sub-50ms latency when gaming. You could play a decent round of TF2 at 90ms. The only genre I imagine causing problems on a cloud PC are rhythm games. Even rage games like Super Meat Boy should be fine with a constant latency, since you're mostly memorizing inputs anyway.
And that's 2022! Fiber has only gotten faster.
Most cloud gaming platforms have a way to redirect gamepads. But they often struggle with specialized controllers, especially ones for racing and flight sims. Many platforms integrate VirtualHere, and it's straight up notorious in this regard. Just google "virtualhere steering wheel problems", and they will come up: device installation failures, stuttering, disconnections...
Redirection software can also strip force feedback data from steering wheel throughput. If someone's going through all this effort to set up a simulation environment, I doubt they're going to simply accept missing FFB!
FlexiHub by Electronic Team, Inc. is better in both regards. I consulted Nikolai Svarachevsky, the lead developer of FlexiHub, and he explained it this way. The main difference is that the device connection is very direct - there's no xinput/dinput/anything else between the host and the client computers, it's just pure USB. This means that force feedback data is treated like the rest of the data, and fully delivered to the remote PC.
Of course, this also means that drivers need to be installed on the cloud PC, and not the local computer. And you need access to the desktop! Simplified, desktop-less cloud gaming services can't have FlexiHub installed on them at all.
For instance, these services and platforms work with FlexiHub:
- Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines
- Vagon Cloud Computer
- Shadow PC
- Maximum Settings
On the other hand, these are NOT supported:
- GeForce Now
- Xbox Cloud Gaming
- Boosteroid
- Amazon Luna
Basically, if it's a cloud PC service, FlexiHub works. If it's a "game streaming" or "cloud gaming" service, these don't have desktop access most of the time.
If you have the optimal situation for FlexiHub - a cloud PC service with desktop access and issues with specialized controllers - give it a try. FlexiHub provides new users with 5 free connections.
Keep in mind - FlexiHub works on Linux as well. With more and more games supporting Linux, this may actually come in handy. On the other hand, all the niche simulators tend to be Windows-only.
Hope you enjoyed the article! Have a good one.
You can find some of my credentials here. I prefer indie games, so the GPU shortage flew right past me, and I wasn't hit all that hard by the RAM prices. My reflexes are pretty slow, so I stay away from bullet hells, soulslikes and such, but I still have a few favorite platformers (love the movement in SWD 2!), and have tried a massive amount of games in different genres. The longest time I've spent with a game was probably with Into the Breach.
