Will cloud gaming kill consoles?

What is the point in owning a console or a gaming pc when you can play on the cloud? Yes right now the market is not ready for it. But 10 years down the road why not? I have used onlive and gaikai for a while now. Onlive is a bit laggy and the picture can be a bit blurry. But gaikai runs so smooth on my pc it feels like im playing an online game. very little lag on my pc maybe because their data centre is closer.

I feel the future of gaming will be like on demand tv. every company will have their own channel you can play games on for a fee. I love hard copies but this looks like its the future to me.

What is the point in owning a console or a gaming pc when you can play on the cloud? Yes right now the market is not ready for it. But 10 years down the road why not? I have used onlive and gaikai for a while now. Onlive is a bit laggy and the picture can be a bit blurry. But gaikai runs so smooth on my pc it feels like im playing an online game. very little lag on my pc maybe because their data centre is closer.

I feel the future of gaming will be like on demand tv. every company will have their own channel you can play games on for a fee. I love hard copies but this looks like its the future to me.

No.

Because you still need a machine to access the cloud? And if cloud gaming becomes popular, then I'm certain the major players will find some way to adapt to it.

Consoles maybe, but not PC gaming. Local bandwidth will always exceed network bandwidth so games will always look better on any moderately powerful machine than on the cloud. Not to mention modding is basically impossible on a cloud service unless they intend to give every buyer a unique copy of the game with dedicated hard drive space.

Why would I want to pay a fee when I can buy a game out right?

@Geno: I think it will effect both i don't see how pc will not be changed by it. Most people don't care about hardware so instead of buying a new pc or upgrades they can just game on the clould and not worry about it. Yes you do need hardware to run cloud games but as long as it can handel a video steam thats all you need. Very weak and cheap hardware would work just fine. Some tvs have apps where you dont need any extra hardware to use onlive.

Nope

@Geno: I think it will effect both i don't see how pc will not be changed by it. Most people don't care about hardware so instead of buying a new pc or upgrades they can just game on the clould and not worry about it. Yes you do need hardware to run cloud games but as long as it can handel a video steam thats all you need. Very weak and cheap hardware would work just fine. Some tvs have apps where you dont need any extra hardware to use onlive.

Cloud gaming will become a rental only service once the interest has died down and people go back to being rational.

@Dagbiker said:

Why would I want to pay a fee when I can buy a game out right?

i think it will be like onlives playpass thing where you can play 200+ games for 10$ a month.

@banishedsoul1 said:

@Dagbiker said:

Why would I want to pay a fee when I can buy a game out right?

i think it will be like onlives playpass thing where you can play 200+ games for 10$ a month.

I still would much rather own it.

No. If anything I suspect "cloud" features will expand how consoles work.

Is Gaikai better than OnLive? 'Cause I think I've tried Gaikai for Dead Space 2 and ME2, but they are the same as OnLive with how they can be (or simply always are) blurry. I think they need to do much better with it if it's going to come into place, otherwise I'd hope not. They both ran good when I played them, but they're not ready right now. I think it needs to look just as good and crisp as anything anyone else would put out, but the blurriness and potential lag at times is a problem right now. If this kind of thing were fixed, there'd almost be no point in having consoles or PC gaming, but I really don't see this happening soon.

No because not everyone has a 5Mb+ connection on their homes, plus even those who do still have to be near the datacenters for very low latency because otherwise the control response is horrid.

To be clear, I don't think the "streaming" technologies like OnLive and Gaikai are "ready for prime time" just yet. However I do think things like storage and configurations are ready today and should be integrated. Especially when working with data streaming, the patching happens at the server and you always get the latest version.

@NTM said:

Is Gaikai better than OnLive? 'Cause I think I've tried Gaikai for Dead Space 2 and ME2, but they are the same as OnLive with how they can be (or simply always are) blurry. I think they need to do much better with it if it's going to come into place, otherwise I'd hope not. They both ran good when I played them, but they're not ready right now. I think it needs to look just as good and crisp as anything anyone else would put out, but the blurriness and potential lag at times is a problem right now. If this kind of thing were fixed, there'd almost be no point in having consoles or PC gaming, but I really don't see this happening soon.

As far as i know gaikai is a demo service. I found gaikai runs better for me and looks a bit sharper. But maybe thats because they have closer servers.

@banishedsoul1: Yeah, Gaikai is a demo service, but that doesn't really change the topic. It's about the quality of the service, whether it be for a demo or full game. I'm just saying, I don't think from either one of those, they have shown that they're or we're ready for it.

@NTM said:

@banishedsoul1: Yeah, Gaikai is a demo service, but that doesn't really change the topic. It's about the quality of the service, whether it be for a demo or full game. I'm just saying, I don't think from either one of those, they have shown that they're or we're ready for it.

I never said they are ready. I am talking about the future...

I`m into videogames enough to run around this board, and I don`t even know what the fuck cloud gaming is so I`m gonna go with no.

If it was important, I wouldn`t be able to avoid knowing what it is.

@banishedsoul1: I know you are. That's why I said that I hope that in the future, if it is the way we'll be playing games, I hope by then it's fixed.

@NTM said:

@banishedsoul1: I know you are. That's why I said that I hope that in the future, if it is the way we'll be playing games, I hope by then it's fixed.

I think it more depends on where you live. Gaikai runs great for me but onlive is a bit iffy. They just need more data centres around and it should fix alot of the lag.

Not as long as internet connections continue to be slow and bad. I live in a small town, and I'm pretty sure it'll be a long time before any sort of new cable lines or anything get put in, so the connection (which is pretty decent, all things considered) won't be getting any better any time soon. And I'm willing to bet that's how it is for most people.

Well, the answer is that none of us know. We are talking about the future, and if internet service providers continue to be shitty, then a lot of people won't be using cloud gaming. Something bigger is going to have take place in order for consoles to be killed.

I think modding is overrated as most games cannot be modded.

Eventually, yes it will in a sense. It will be a future generation of gaming because such functionality can be integrated into current and/or next-gen consoles.

The only hurdles I see right now is the unsatisfactory broadband internet market saturation, having to be always online, pricing model, and EXCLUSIVE KILLER-APP games that can only be had through a streaming service.

Imagine a future world where an internet outage is as frequent as over-the-air television outages are today. That same world where corporations learned from their "nickel and dim.... 5 and 20 dollaring" models and offered reasonable pricing structures. Such a world where you're playing games harnessing the power of entire render-farms and would be unpractical for a consumer device to render.

It will come. Mark this post, because I'm really confident that I'm 110% right. Thing is, I felt this way before OnLive was even a thing.

not unless internet improves greatly.

It will kill existing consoles in the same way that Spotify has "killed" iTunes.

It'll create and fill a market niche, for those who like to jump from game to game quickly. For the people who buy a game or two a year, or want to own their stuff outright, it won't be a good investment, so they'll be happy with the current model.

I'm fairly convinced that in 10 years we'll see all physical media as an antiquity. No one will own everything, everything will be licenced. Which will be exactly what we have today, but without the comfort of physical copies to make us think we own things.

Nope

@banishedsoul1 said:

@Dagbiker said:

Why would I want to pay a fee when I can buy a game out right?

i think it will be like onlives playpass thing where you can play 200+ games for 10$ a month.

Uhm... but who honestly has that much time to make actual use of this offer? Except for unemployed people (no hard feelings!)... :D

@banishedsoul1: The problem for me personally, isn't really lag. I just hate how it looks like you're playing a YouTube video, in a sense. At times it could be worse than that.

Doubt it but who knows!

@NTM said:

@banishedsoul1: The problem for me personally, isn't really lag. I just hate how it looks like you're playing a YouTube video, in a sense. At times it could be worse than that.

This is the major hurdle for cloud gaming. Until infrastructure to support high-speed internet is ubiquitous, cloud gaming will only hold a minority share of the market.

EDIT: Misread NTM's post. My comment doesn't apply directly but still stands on it's own. :/

Because it will never be as good, and no one can support the entire world playing games that way any time soon, even in 10 years we won't be able to handle that much traffic. Those services aren't exactly being used a hell of a lot and already they are struggling to keep up with demand. It'll be a hell of a long time until then, and I will still need a PC for a million other things, including accessing something like that so I'd honestly rather just spend a couple grand and play the games at a higher resolution, higher settings, and higher framerate, with no lag from an outside system.

@banishedsoul1 said:

@Dagbiker said:

Why would I want to pay a fee when I can buy a game out right?

i think it will be like onlives playpass thing where you can play 200+ games for 10$ a month.

I think they stopped doing that, didn't they? And it was a pretty limited selection when I last checked that particular feature out.

Considering that the average connection is under 3mbits, I wouldn't worry about that too much.

@MordeaniisChaos said:

Because it will never be as good, and no one can support the entire world playing games that way any time soon, even in 10 years we won't be able to handle that much traffic. Those services aren't exactly being used a hell of a lot and already they are struggling to keep up with demand. It'll be a hell of a long time until then, and I will still need a PC for a million other things, including accessing something like that so I'd honestly rather just spend a couple grand and play the games at a higher resolution, higher settings, and higher framerate, with no lag from an outside system.

The need for a pc is really changing. People can do almost everything on their tablet or smart phone. Even tvs these days can run apps. In the future if you can get 1080p that have similar quality to net flix then cloud gaming will hold its own to any console or pc. They will have many severs so traffic should not be a problem. I don't want gaming to be all in the cloud but it is looking to be the future. They will upgrade as demand goes up its like people were saying when cell phones came out there is no way they could have eought towers for everyone and know like 97% of people have access to cell phone service in usa and canada.

I would rather own the game than pay for the right to access it. Then when it's no longer being offered, guess what? I can still go back and play it.

Unless we get some kinda response time revolution for Internet I just can't imagine cloud gaming is a profitable service worldwide. And I can't see why publishers would want to limit their consumer base.

Not anytime soon, but I could see it when hi-speed internet is more readily available everywhere, and probably more standardized price wise. With so many ISP providers having bandwith caps, it wouldn't take long to reach it if you're streaming HD video of a game to your TV for hours at a time.

@banishedsoul1: I'm a writer, and if I write, I will never do it on a tablet or god forbid, a smart phone. I will do it with pen and paper, or a computer. A proper, real, keyboard having computer.

I'm also a photoshop user, which would never run properly at the high resolutions that I edit, and I would never use a tablet for that kind of work, and I would never do it over a video stream because you can't get compression like that on your photoshoping, you just can't have that.

I'm also an amateur 3D artist, which would be impossible to do without a beefy amount of power, and again, compression on the display would great hinder that sort of work.

TV apps are a steaming fucking pile of shit, running at about 5 frames per second.

And you have no fucking clue what you are talking about in terms of traffic. Netflix is the single largest thing that uses up bandwidth in America. Gaming always over the cloud would be even more demanding. If you live in a big City, you'll see the effect of extra traffic. With comcast, living in a smaller town, I got 25-30 Mbps. I moved to Seattle, a very large city, and the same plan gets us about 12 Mbps. Streaming HD video and high quality Audio with no compression, and at least 7.1 channels and at whatever the highest potential resolution is (2560x1600 at the moment) for every single gamer whenever they used games? Especially on a 300GB a month cap.

Do you have any idea what kind of bandwidth that takes up? I'll give you a clue: a hell of a lot.

Not to mention having to fuckin store the games, and own enough computing power to let people use. Traffic is more than just the pipes, it's the servers that have to serve up terabyte after terabyte of content. It has to be capable of storing things like mods, give access to tweaking, things like that. It has to be able to interact with local storage as well. It's a hell of a lot to transfer back and forth.

And as well as that, to improve latency, the real issue at hand with this technology, you have to redo the whole infrastructure. Our cables just aren't fast enough at the present, and you can't just make em bigger to make em faster.

Everyone I know personally that owns a PC will not be changing their desire and need for a real, actual PC any time soon, myself included. You are assuming it's simple matter, but it's not true at all.

@MordeaniisChaos said:

@banishedsoul1: I'm a writer, and if I write, I will never do it on a tablet or god forbid, a smart phone. I will do it with pen and paper, or a computer. A proper, real, keyboard having computer.

I'm also a photoshop user, which would never run properly at the high resolutions that I edit, and I would never use a tablet for that kind of work, and I would never do it over a video stream because you can't get compression like that on your photoshoping, you just can't have that.

I'm also an amateur 3D artist, which would be impossible to do without a beefy amount of power, and again, compression on the display would great hinder that sort of work.

TV apps are a steaming fucking pile of shit, running at about 5 frames per second.

And you have no fucking clue what you are talking about in terms of traffic. Netflix is the single largest thing that uses up bandwidth in America. Gaming always over the cloud would be even more demanding. If you live in a big City, you'll see the effect of extra traffic. With comcast, living in a smaller town, I got 25-30 Mbps. I moved to Seattle, a very large city, and the same plan gets us about 12 Mbps. Streaming HD video and high quality Audio with no compression, and at least 7.1 channels and at whatever the highest potential resolution is (2560x1600 at the moment) for every single gamer whenever they used games? Especially on a 300GB a month cap.

Do you have any idea what kind of bandwidth that takes up? I'll give you a clue: a hell of a lot.

Not to mention having to fuckin store the games, and own enough computing power to let people use. Traffic is more than just the pipes, it's the servers that have to serve up terabyte after terabyte of content. It has to be capable of storing things like mods, give access to tweaking, things like that. It has to be able to interact with local storage as well. It's a hell of a lot to transfer back and forth.

And as well as that, to improve latency, the real issue at hand with this technology, you have to redo the whole infrastructure. Our cables just aren't fast enough at the present, and you can't just make em bigger to make em faster.

Everyone I know personally that owns a PC will not be changing their desire and need for a real, actual PC any time soon, myself included. You are assuming it's simple matter, but it's not true at all.

you mad bro? You know in the future you could use photo shop on the cloud? yes netflix does you a lot but guess what? I have never once been told its to busy for me to watch a movie. If you need a work station good for you but most people don't need one. Not saying no one will use pcs but it a standard desktop tower is going to be far less relevant when there are all this over devices and other types of pcs like all in ones, netops and so on.

@banishedsoul1 said:

@MordeaniisChaos said:

@banishedsoul1: I'm a writer, and if I write, I will never do it on a tablet or god forbid, a smart phone. I will do it with pen and paper, or a computer. A proper, real, keyboard having computer.

I'm also a photoshop user, which would never run properly at the high resolutions that I edit, and I would never use a tablet for that kind of work, and I would never do it over a video stream because you can't get compression like that on your photoshoping, you just can't have that.

I'm also an amateur 3D artist, which would be impossible to do without a beefy amount of power, and again, compression on the display would great hinder that sort of work.

TV apps are a steaming fucking pile of shit, running at about 5 frames per second.

And you have no fucking clue what you are talking about in terms of traffic. Netflix is the single largest thing that uses up bandwidth in America. Gaming always over the cloud would be even more demanding. If you live in a big City, you'll see the effect of extra traffic. With comcast, living in a smaller town, I got 25-30 Mbps. I moved to Seattle, a very large city, and the same plan gets us about 12 Mbps. Streaming HD video and high quality Audio with no compression, and at least 7.1 channels and at whatever the highest potential resolution is (2560x1600 at the moment) for every single gamer whenever they used games? Especially on a 300GB a month cap.

Do you have any idea what kind of bandwidth that takes up? I'll give you a clue: a hell of a lot.

Not to mention having to fuckin store the games, and own enough computing power to let people use. Traffic is more than just the pipes, it's the servers that have to serve up terabyte after terabyte of content. It has to be capable of storing things like mods, give access to tweaking, things like that. It has to be able to interact with local storage as well. It's a hell of a lot to transfer back and forth.

And as well as that, to improve latency, the real issue at hand with this technology, you have to redo the whole infrastructure. Our cables just aren't fast enough at the present, and you can't just make em bigger to make em faster.

Everyone I know personally that owns a PC will not be changing their desire and need for a real, actual PC any time soon, myself included. You are assuming it's simple matter, but it's not true at all.

you mad bro? You know in the future you could use photo shop on the cloud? yes netflix does you a lot but guess what? I have never once been told its to busy for me to watch a movie. If you need a work station good for you but most people don't need one. Not saying no one will use pcs but it a standard desktop tower is going to be far less relevant when there are all this over devices and other types of pcs like all in ones, netops and so on.

I'd say that you sound madder than he does, and you failed to understand everything he just said. A full on PC will always be more powerful than anything a tablet could deliver, anything a cloud gaming service could deliver, and anything a console can deliver. PC's are pretty much the most powerful and most versatile piece of technology practically available these days, and frankly that's not something that's just going to up and change.

No, I'm not mad. I'm sternly telling you that cloud gaming hasn't gotten popular and isn't going to get popular because it's nowhere near as good as what we already have. It would be like trying to sell people airplane tickets after teleportation had been invented - it won't ever work.

I'll eat my Xbox 360 if it does.

@believer258 said:

@banishedsoul1 said:

@MordeaniisChaos said:

@banishedsoul1: I'm a writer, and if I write, I will never do it on a tablet or god forbid, a smart phone. I will do it with pen and paper, or a computer. A proper, real, keyboard having computer.

I'm also a photoshop user, which would never run properly at the high resolutions that I edit, and I would never use a tablet for that kind of work, and I would never do it over a video stream because you can't get compression like that on your photoshoping, you just can't have that.

I'm also an amateur 3D artist, which would be impossible to do without a beefy amount of power, and again, compression on the display would great hinder that sort of work.

TV apps are a steaming fucking pile of shit, running at about 5 frames per second.

And you have no fucking clue what you are talking about in terms of traffic. Netflix is the single largest thing that uses up bandwidth in America. Gaming always over the cloud would be even more demanding. If you live in a big City, you'll see the effect of extra traffic. With comcast, living in a smaller town, I got 25-30 Mbps. I moved to Seattle, a very large city, and the same plan gets us about 12 Mbps. Streaming HD video and high quality Audio with no compression, and at least 7.1 channels and at whatever the highest potential resolution is (2560x1600 at the moment) for every single gamer whenever they used games? Especially on a 300GB a month cap.

Do you have any idea what kind of bandwidth that takes up? I'll give you a clue: a hell of a lot.

Not to mention having to fuckin store the games, and own enough computing power to let people use. Traffic is more than just the pipes, it's the servers that have to serve up terabyte after terabyte of content. It has to be capable of storing things like mods, give access to tweaking, things like that. It has to be able to interact with local storage as well. It's a hell of a lot to transfer back and forth.

And as well as that, to improve latency, the real issue at hand with this technology, you have to redo the whole infrastructure. Our cables just aren't fast enough at the present, and you can't just make em bigger to make em faster.

Everyone I know personally that owns a PC will not be changing their desire and need for a real, actual PC any time soon, myself included. You are assuming it's simple matter, but it's not true at all.

you mad bro? You know in the future you could use photo shop on the cloud? yes netflix does you a lot but guess what? I have never once been told its to busy for me to watch a movie. If you need a work station good for you but most people don't need one. Not saying no one will use pcs but it a standard desktop tower is going to be far less relevant when there are all this over devices and other types of pcs like all in ones, netops and so on.

I'd say that you sound madder than he does, and you failed to understand everything he just said. A full on PC will always be more powerful than anything a tablet could deliver, anything a cloud gaming service could deliver, and anything a console can deliver. PC's are pretty much the most powerful and most versatile piece of technology practically available these days, and frankly that's not something that's just going to up and change.

No, I'm not mad. I'm sternly telling you that cloud gaming hasn't gotten popular and isn't going to get popular because it's nowhere near as good as what we already have. It would be like trying to sell people airplane tickets after teleportation had been invented - it won't ever work.

I'll eat my Xbox 360 if it does.

I just think you have no vision for the future. You act as if it wont get any better when companies are spending billions to bring it to live. Hell gaikai alone sold for almost 400 million. You cant tell me sony does not have big plans for it. I can see cloud gaming doing great for the mainstream no longer will parents have to spend 400$ + just on hardware. People will be able to play top tear games on ultra low end hardware they already have.

@Video_Game_King said:

Because you still need a machine to access the cloud? And if cloud gaming becomes popular, then I'm certain the major players will find some way to adapt to it.

@banishedsoul1 said:

@believer258 said:

@banishedsoul1 said:

@MordeaniisChaos said:

@banishedsoul1: I'm a writer, and if I write, I will never do it on a tablet or god forbid, a smart phone. I will do it with pen and paper, or a computer. A proper, real, keyboard having computer.

I'm also a photoshop user, which would never run properly at the high resolutions that I edit, and I would never use a tablet for that kind of work, and I would never do it over a video stream because you can't get compression like that on your photoshoping, you just can't have that.

I'm also an amateur 3D artist, which would be impossible to do without a beefy amount of power, and again, compression on the display would great hinder that sort of work.

TV apps are a steaming fucking pile of shit, running at about 5 frames per second.

And you have no fucking clue what you are talking about in terms of traffic. Netflix is the single largest thing that uses up bandwidth in America. Gaming always over the cloud would be even more demanding. If you live in a big City, you'll see the effect of extra traffic. With comcast, living in a smaller town, I got 25-30 Mbps. I moved to Seattle, a very large city, and the same plan gets us about 12 Mbps. Streaming HD video and high quality Audio with no compression, and at least 7.1 channels and at whatever the highest potential resolution is (2560x1600 at the moment) for every single gamer whenever they used games? Especially on a 300GB a month cap.

Do you have any idea what kind of bandwidth that takes up? I'll give you a clue: a hell of a lot.

Not to mention having to fuckin store the games, and own enough computing power to let people use. Traffic is more than just the pipes, it's the servers that have to serve up terabyte after terabyte of content. It has to be capable of storing things like mods, give access to tweaking, things like that. It has to be able to interact with local storage as well. It's a hell of a lot to transfer back and forth.

And as well as that, to improve latency, the real issue at hand with this technology, you have to redo the whole infrastructure. Our cables just aren't fast enough at the present, and you can't just make em bigger to make em faster.

Everyone I know personally that owns a PC will not be changing their desire and need for a real, actual PC any time soon, myself included. You are assuming it's simple matter, but it's not true at all.

you mad bro? You know in the future you could use photo shop on the cloud? yes netflix does you a lot but guess what? I have never once been told its to busy for me to watch a movie. If you need a work station good for you but most people don't need one. Not saying no one will use pcs but it a standard desktop tower is going to be far less relevant when there are all this over devices and other types of pcs like all in ones, netops and so on.

I'd say that you sound madder than he does, and you failed to understand everything he just said. A full on PC will always be more powerful than anything a tablet could deliver, anything a cloud gaming service could deliver, and anything a console can deliver. PC's are pretty much the most powerful and most versatile piece of technology practically available these days, and frankly that's not something that's just going to up and change.

No, I'm not mad. I'm sternly telling you that cloud gaming hasn't gotten popular and isn't going to get popular because it's nowhere near as good as what we already have. It would be like trying to sell people airplane tickets after teleportation had been invented - it won't ever work.

I'll eat my Xbox 360 if it does.

I just think you have no vision for the future. You act as if it wont get any better when companies are spending billions to bring it to live. Hell gaikai alone sold for almost 400 million. You cant tell me sony does not have big plans for it. I can see cloud gaming doing great for the mainstream no longer will parents have to spend 400$ + just on hardware. People will be able to play top tear games on ultra low end hardware they already have.

...and I can see you don't understand much about computers, network infrastructures, or the poor economic state that much of the first world is in at this moment. Paying top dollar for the best internet connection every month plus some money for a subscription gaming service is a whole lot going down the drain for the fifteen bucks an hour that little Johnny's parents make in a rural area of America; it's a lot more sensible for such a family to get little Johnny an Xbox and a game every 3 months that he'll be able to play for years on end without keeping some fucking subscription up.

Cloud gaming fails technologically and economically, both today and in the future. I might be wrong fifty or a hundred years from now, but even then I seriously doubt that locally owning media will be something that goes "out of style" or becomes "obsolete." You can make a case for digital downloads becoming the unquestioned standard but you'll never make a reasonable one for cloud gaming when it makes no sense for anyone that doesn't have the greatest internet connection and isn't near a data center.

This whole thing reads like a Jay444111 thread.

@believer258 said:

@banishedsoul1 said:

@believer258 said:

@banishedsoul1 said:

@MordeaniisChaos said:

@banishedsoul1: I'm a writer, and if I write, I will never do it on a tablet or god forbid, a smart phone. I will do it with pen and paper, or a computer. A proper, real, keyboard having computer.

I'm also a photoshop user, which would never run properly at the high resolutions that I edit, and I would never use a tablet for that kind of work, and I would never do it over a video stream because you can't get compression like that on your photoshoping, you just can't have that.

I'm also an amateur 3D artist, which would be impossible to do without a beefy amount of power, and again, compression on the display would great hinder that sort of work.

TV apps are a steaming fucking pile of shit, running at about 5 frames per second.

And you have no fucking clue what you are talking about in terms of traffic. Netflix is the single largest thing that uses up bandwidth in America. Gaming always over the cloud would be even more demanding. If you live in a big City, you'll see the effect of extra traffic. With comcast, living in a smaller town, I got 25-30 Mbps. I moved to Seattle, a very large city, and the same plan gets us about 12 Mbps. Streaming HD video and high quality Audio with no compression, and at least 7.1 channels and at whatever the highest potential resolution is (2560x1600 at the moment) for every single gamer whenever they used games? Especially on a 300GB a month cap.

Do you have any idea what kind of bandwidth that takes up? I'll give you a clue: a hell of a lot.

Not to mention having to fuckin store the games, and own enough computing power to let people use. Traffic is more than just the pipes, it's the servers that have to serve up terabyte after terabyte of content. It has to be capable of storing things like mods, give access to tweaking, things like that. It has to be able to interact with local storage as well. It's a hell of a lot to transfer back and forth.

And as well as that, to improve latency, the real issue at hand with this technology, you have to redo the whole infrastructure. Our cables just aren't fast enough at the present, and you can't just make em bigger to make em faster.

Everyone I know personally that owns a PC will not be changing their desire and need for a real, actual PC any time soon, myself included. You are assuming it's simple matter, but it's not true at all.

you mad bro? You know in the future you could use photo shop on the cloud? yes netflix does you a lot but guess what? I have never once been told its to busy for me to watch a movie. If you need a work station good for you but most people don't need one. Not saying no one will use pcs but it a standard desktop tower is going to be far less relevant when there are all this over devices and other types of pcs like all in ones, netops and so on.

I'd say that you sound madder than he does, and you failed to understand everything he just said. A full on PC will always be more powerful than anything a tablet could deliver, anything a cloud gaming service could deliver, and anything a console can deliver. PC's are pretty much the most powerful and most versatile piece of technology practically available these days, and frankly that's not something that's just going to up and change.

No, I'm not mad. I'm sternly telling you that cloud gaming hasn't gotten popular and isn't going to get popular because it's nowhere near as good as what we already have. It would be like trying to sell people airplane tickets after teleportation had been invented - it won't ever work.

I'll eat my Xbox 360 if it does.

I just think you have no vision for the future. You act as if it wont get any better when companies are spending billions to bring it to live. Hell gaikai alone sold for almost 400 million. You cant tell me sony does not have big plans for it. I can see cloud gaming doing great for the mainstream no longer will parents have to spend 400$ + just on hardware. People will be able to play top tear games on ultra low end hardware they already have.

...and I can see you don't understand much about computers, network infrastructures, or the poor economic state that much of the first world is in at this moment. Paying top dollar for the best internet connection every month plus some money for a subscription gaming service is a whole lot going down the drain for the fifteen bucks an hour that little Johnny's parents make in a rural area of America; it's a lot more sensible for such a family to get little Johnny an Xbox and a game every 3 months that he'll be able to play for years on end without keeping some fucking subscription up.

Cloud gaming fails technologically and economically, both today and in the future. I might be wrong fifty or a hundred years from now, but even then I seriously doubt that locally owning media will be something that goes "out of style" or becomes "obsolete." You can make a case for digital downloads becoming the unquestioned standard but you'll never make a reasonable one for cloud gaming when it makes no sense for anyone that doesn't have the greatest internet connection and isn't near a data center.

again you keep acting as if they wont improve. My internet speed went from 256kpbs to 18mbps in a few years. If you live in the middle of no where which most people don't then its most lilky that your town only has a few 100 people in it. The vast majority of people in the first world do have access to the internet. In canada we have 28 million users and our population is only 34 million. Canada is a huge nation with a population that is very spread out. The markets go up and down all the time. The first world is fine and will stay that way for a long time.