Will cloud gaming kill consoles?

@banishedsoul1 said:

@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.

Rural =/= the middle of nowhere with only 100 people around, and simple access to the internet does not guarantee a good enough connection.

You still seem to miss that computers themselves will continue to improve as well, constantly giving a better experience than any cloud gaming service will. I didn't say that the first world isn't going to stop being "fine", but I did say that cloud gaming isn't practical in any sense for most people, both today and in the future. The future might hold better internet connections but it will also hold better graphics cards, faster processors, and more RAM - no internet will be able to keep up with that, and no single device will be able to beat the personal computer in terms of usefulness because it does every last thing that you need it to. If you think I'm being close-minded, then sit back and ask yourself if there's any practical computer application that you can do across the internet with your tablet as well as or better than you could on your computer.

In short, you won't be playing Bioshock 4 or The Elder Scrolls 7 across the internet because computers will have improved alongside the internet. If you can't grasp this and can't grasp that I fully understand (and fully disagree) with your statement about the future, then do not respond.

In the future? Sure maybe at some point down the line when everyone is on fiber optic. But 10 years (say about a single new console cycle at this point) is a far too good an estimate for the tech we have today, not just in terms of internet infrastructure either. Especially when you consider the rate at which the internet has moved forward in the past 10 years, which is actually not that much (relatively to what would be required of it obv.). It would take an actual breakthrough or general tech leap to achieve total cloud gaming in 10 years, otherwise we are looking at a far longer estimate.

"Cloud" stuff has long since ceased to be a be all end all buzzword for tech, cloud solutions have become a part of existing structures and implementations integrated into existing tech. Not replacing it overall just helping in certain areas. If anything it will be likewise for games for a good long while yet. We would first need to see general tech start switching completely over to the cloud and only then gaming will follow as it always has been laging quite a bit behind. And we are far from seeing that yet. Additionally the progress is (and will be) even further artificially slowed by the hardware big boys who love us buying their stuff.

why would it kill consoles, that makes NO sense. like at all...

@banishedsoul1 said:

@believer258 said:

@banishedsoul1 said:

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.

I just want to say you can't rule out anything in the future. Cloud gaming may be the future of most video gaming conventions and you can't say that will fail or it will succeed 100%. Technology has the trickle down effect meaning those who live in the more rural areas will probably be out of luck, this happened in the past, now, and will probably continue in the future. Companies won't really care about providing services with those people, look at cellphone companies. They do that. You probably have bad signals where there are hardly anybody living there. They hardly build towers there, because that's not where the market is.

Years ago many people were doubting digital downloads, because they complained about people not having the internet connection. Look at where we are now. More and more digital downloads, it's one of the staples of the industry. You cannot doubt that cloud gaming will become more than viable as connection speeds get higher and more people are getting those speeds. As of right now, pure cloud gaming consoles wouldn't work for the reasons that you guys stated, but down the line that service will get better.

In 20 years, if everything goes fine in the world, we'd probably see cloud gaming as one of the primary ways to play. Look at the past 20 years at how technology progressed, it's progressed a whole lot. I don't think anyone can doubt that businesses or people will not find a way to make cloud gaming to work on a much larger scale.

Swear dude... you are against Computer games outright it seems like.

@banishedsoul1: Please change your avatar.

I think cloud gaming is clearly the future. Whether it will happen in the next generation or the generation after next, its clearly coming.

Why the fuck would I pay for the feeling of my game being underwater?

@GrantHeaslip said:

You've got to remember that most of the highly developed first world don't have anywhere near the internet connection to make cloud gaming a good experience. I'm in the densest area of the biggest city in Canada, and my cable 28 Mb connection will frequently get weird latency spikes (which would presumably result in huge input delays or video pauses). In previous apartments, I've regularly had hours-long downtimes and multiple-times-a-day connection blips. Many suburban and rural areas are lucky to have 5 Mb DSL connections or overburdened cable.

I do suspect that we'll eventually arrive at cloud gaming -- it makes sense -- but not until everyone's got fibre (don't hold your breath).

I have fiber

OnLive still didn't feel good when I tried it.

No or at least not for a long time. When we can play games streaming problem free no lag, no bandwidth requirements, have some kind of offline solution for people not online. These are the problems that would need to be ironed out before cloud gaming replaces consoles.

You would never have enough bandwidth to do complete cloud gaming. It just wouldn't be fast enough. You need that local hardware and response time. When doing something in a virtual machine, online, there is ALWAYS going to be lag, and the more users who are online doing that exact same thing will only make the matters worse.

I'm sure something like what you are suggesting could be done, but there is nothing that can replace that box you have in the room with you. Servers and such can only handle so much.

We're just so far from being able to support that model. By the time we can, consoles/games/computers/internet/tv will no doubt be a different beast. Just look at the last few years and the changes they've brought. Never before have so many people owned so many powerful computers.

Not until internet infrastructure is so comprehensive that cloud games suffer no performance drawbacks of any kind.  We're much closer to download-entire-game-to-console (digital distribution) being the only way to buy games than we are to cloud gaming. 

@banishedsoul1 said:

@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.

Ahh....well you figured it out.

Those data centers aren't free, and they need a space to be put in.

Also have you noticed how EA shuts down servers in order for you to buy the next game in the franchise? What will stop companies from doing that? What if I wanted to play some Kameo but because nobody else plays that anymore they removed it from the service and now I can't play Kameo anymore :(

That would suck.

It is so hard to say what I might or might not do in ten years. It is hard to say what gaming will be like in that time too. I will follow the games, if THE GAMES move off consoles I will follow. You could say the "cloud vs. console" debate is more about format rather then content....like carts vs. cd-roms. If the game you want to play are not on consoles, then why stay with consoles would be my thinking.

@Stonyman65 said:

You would never have enough bandwidth to do complete cloud gaming. It just wouldn't be fast enough. You need that local hardware and response time. When doing something in a virtual machine, online, there is ALWAYS going to be lag, and the more users who are online doing that exact same thing will only make the matters worse.

I'm sure something like what you are suggesting could be done, but there is nothing that can replace that box you have in the room with you. Servers and such can only handle so much.

THIS. The fact is that not enough people have fast enough internet connection because ISPs do not provide it cheaply or is it readily every where. Bandwidth is throttled and internet usage is capped monthly.