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[Thirty7ven]

THE FUTURE OF gaming lives inside metal cages, if you believe some of the biggest gaming companies out there. Piled on hardware racks, blinking with little green lights, it’s calculated inside stacked-together computers and pumped out of a remote server through big underground tubes. It is distributed across the globe—Shanghai, London, Prague, Virginia—from nondescript, city block-sized architectural monoliths. To see it up close, you would need to pass through multiple levels of security.

Over the past two years, it seems every major gaming and tech company has launched a cloud gaming service: Microsoft’s Project xCloud, Sony’s PlayStation Now, Google’s Stadia, Nvidia’s GeForce Now, Tencent’s Start. Facebook and Amazon are reportedly sniffing around too. For a monthly fee—$10 to $35—users can play a library of videogames on demand, streamed to their phone, television, console, computer, or tablet.

More at https://www.wired.com/story/cloud-gaming-infrastructure-arms-race/

 

[ZywyPL]

It's inevitable, but it has to be done right, from the hardware and software side, and most importantly - from the business model perspective - the streaming services IMO won't seriously take off if people will have to pay 50-60$ for each individual title (on top of monthly fees for using the servers), such model just kills the entire idea behind streaming gaming services, it has been done over and over and failed miserably every single time, OnLive had this initial idea where you would have to pay fixed monthly fee and that's it, every single title on the service would be at your disposal, but they ditched that during development and the service was DOA because of that. Almost decade passed and we see Google repeating the same mistake with Stadia. Microsoft's Game Pass is looking like how proper streaming service should work, but the problem/question is 3rd party support, without them there is only so much library you can offer by yourself, and paying monthly where the games themselves are released every half a year or so also makes the service rather pointless. Time will tell, we need at least another 10 years to see which route each publisher will take, where it will lead them, how those services will adopt, at the end of the day it's the consumer who dictate everything,

 

[Stilton Disco]

Publishers and some platform holders desperately want this to be true, because it means vastly higher profit margins and zero rights on the part of the consumer, but unless they find a way to alter the laws of physics, it's always going to be shit compared to local hardware.

All we can do is avoid buying in and let these greedy cunts waste their investments until they all go the way of Stadia.