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>> It's not a matter of technology, it's a matter of physical impossibility. I would say (and I've been saying this all along) is that it's first and foremost
by w0utert 12y ago
>> It's not a matter of technology, it's a matter of physical impossibility.
I would say (and I've been saying this all along) is that it's first and foremost a matter of economic impossibility.
Under the assumption that you can make the technology work well enough for a sufficiently large group of potential customers, the business case for streaming games simply doesn't make sense to me. You need to invest huge amounts of money to build, maintain, and update (keep current) highly-specialized server farms that are mostly useless for other purposes, in the hopes that people will pay money to play games on them. All while hardware prices keep going down, and game visuals (including resolution and GPU requirements) keep going up. If you stop upgrading your server farms, within a year or 2 what would previously be top-of-the-line hardware will be so cheap (new in the case of PC's or second-hand in the case of consoles), that unless you are dead set on being able to play the same games no matter your physical location, you can get a much better experience for less money by just buying the hardware.
It has always occurred to me that many people are still convinced cloud gaming is a good idea, but the repeated failures of services like OnLive seem to have proven this wrong for now...
- _nedR 12y agoI think the anti-piracy angle is what attracts the game industry. Sony probably envisions a future where GTA XXV is released exclusively as a streaming service. Such a DRM-system would be practically uncrackable (unless you hacked the server or the server code was leaked). Customers would have no say in the matter. This is the main reason why the industry promotes consoles so much. Red dead redemption was never released to PC even though i am sure a lot of PC gamers would want it.
- tracker1 12y agoNot to mention there are whole classes of games where the latency is less of an issue (RTS, board/card games, etc).