Is Cloud Gaming The Future?

So I tried that Control demo that's on the Switch to see how it would even perform on the console. I know Japan has had cloud gaming for awhile, but I didn't really hear much about it.

I gotta say,I was pretty freaking impressed by what I saw. It's Control. Not some lo-fi version, or some xbox 360 edition, legit fucking Control was playing on my Switch. Granted, it's still not the same as putting this on an actual Ps4/Xbone, but I was goddamn surprised how solid it was. It reminded me how I felt when I tried Stadia for the first time. Considering Google Stadia was the industry's whipping boy for awhile, I wasn't expecting much from it. And yet here I am, playing Destiny 2 on my fucking macbook air, a macbook that can barely run Bioshock 2, I'm playing it at a smooth 60fps (too the point that I'm caught off guard by how fast everything seems to play). And goddamn the load times were non-existent. It's kind of crazy that we're now at a point where this stuff just works, and with Microsoft putting itself into the fray, I have to imagine that cloud gaming is now a viable path for gamers who don't want to spend the money on hardware.

So...is it the future?

The future? No. A significant percentage of the future? yes

What you have experienced is what a lot of us did a few years back when stadia had that demo with assodd. It was very much a "Holy shit, this actually works... Mostly" moment. A LOT of people actively ignored that and refused to acknowledge it happened so that they could shit on stadia some more... all while people were using geforce now and the other one.

Which was very reminiscent of The DRM Wars where every single person was an active duty service member who had no internet access but really needed to play 500 hours of neverwinter nights per week. It was impossible and online authentication could NEVER work... yo dog, you around to party up in Everquest later?

Similarly, look at movies and TV. Blurays mostly exist for people who want a plex server these days (although we may be seeing an uptick as bandwidth caps become a lot more "real"). But the 4k crowd still benefit from them.

And that is kind of where I see gaming going. Treat consoles as "platforms". If I want to play Crusader Kings 3 I can start on my desktop when I am done work. Then switch to the living room and an xbox using a gamepad because somehow that is a thing in this poorly thought out example. But, oh no, I need to go visit family so let me get on the public transportation that totally exists in this country and I'll continue my game In The Cloud on my phone until I get there. Then I can use my sister's streaming box to resume that game.

And for the less "core" gamers, it is an even better value proposition. My sister's husband basically plays CoD, Madden, NHL, and not much else. They'll probably buy a PS5 (if they haven't already) but just a reasonable fee and it would probably actually be cheaper to stream those games than have a console and a "full" copy.

I think everything eventually does head to cloud gaming, but it's going to be a long time till that happens as that would require a massive overhaul in internet structure.

There's a lot of folks living in the "I visit gaming websites every day" bubble who don't really get that there is an absolutely massive audience of game-hungry people who don't want to drop even $200 to play whatever triple A banger their coworker told them about. This audience doesn't need 120fps in 4K with ray tracing and an Elite Series 2 controller. Streaming probably isn't the primary way anybody who uses this website will ever consume games, but the biggest tech companies in the world aren't all racing to figure it out by accident. Fortnite has something like 80 million mobile downloads. A quarter of PUBG's base is mobile players. Among Us has had over 85 million downloads in the last two months. Accessible gaming is growing, not shrinking. And if somebody can actually figure out the Netflix of games - that is a hardware ambivalent, streaming service, with a sizeable library, they will absolutely corner a fuck off huge market share just like Netflix has.

It has a place, it's super convenient if you have absurdly good internet access, so i don't doubt it'll continue to grow and be available.
Me personally, no, i'm extremely sensitive to input latency and can't imagine ever having internet fast enough, unless i move country.

I’ve been messing around with streaming services for nearly a decade now, going all the way back to playing Deus Ex Human Revolution through OnLive. So I’ve been a believer in the technology for a while. But I’ll echo the sentiments in this thread that streaming is going to be a part of the foreseeable future, but not the entirety of it. Infrastructure, input latency, and the need for an internet connection are all going to prevent it from replacing local client gaming as we know it. But the use cases for streaming get more and more interesting now that the tech has finally hit mainstream. Like, the other day I was on Polygon and read about the Immortals demo on Stadia, and before I could finish the article, the tab I had opened to try the demo had already loaded up for me to check it out. It really felt like magic. Or I was playing CrossCode on Xbox last night but needed to go to bed. No problem, I switched to streaming on my phone and played in bed until I fell asleep. It’s just so convenient and easy, I can totally see the appeal.

It's inevitable. Once you get the market to accept digital delivery and services like Game Pass, it's a very short hop to zero ownership of anything.

The last piece of the puzzle is technical. At this point, Elon Musk probably has more control over widespread adoption of cloud gaming than Google or Microsoft.

I think it's going to become more and more important. As much as everyone derides Stadia, I think they're in a great position right now as we head into the next generation. As the new hardware is expensive and likely difficult to comeby to boot, why not play it instantly instead for a fraction of the cost? In a future dominated by cloud gaming, the idea of the 'console generation' would not even be a thing.

But it comes down to performance. I have yet to try cloud gaming so I don't know how it holds up. Even if it works fine most of the time, I imagine it would be *very* frustrating when it doesn't. Meanwhile, my PS4 and Switch run flawlessly whenever I want them. And of course, mobile devices will always be relevant wherever wifi is not available.

I would never pay $40 for a single game running on a server somewhere in the case of Control on Switch. Who knows how long that server will stay up.

I could definitely see more AA/AAA 3rd party games going the cloud route on the Switch unless they release a Switch Pro with more beefy specs.

While i appreciate being able to play Xbox via cloud streaming while i wait for Xbox Series S to arrive, i would hate for it to be the only way to play Xbox.

I think cloud gaming can be a supplement but should never be a replacement to real hardware.

The cases of games being removed from digital storefronts has to be tiny. Although, in those cases, you can still store and play those games locally.

As my GPU on my aging PC failed, i decided to play my steamcopy of Yakuza Kiwami through Geforce Now for free. (Note, i think that you can't play that game through Geforce Now any longer.) Apart from having to make sure i saved in time and fill in my password every hour (they didn't offer the paid version in my country for extended sessions) , it was a good experience. Even gave me my steam achievements. I felt like i played the real thing all the way through on a PC that isn't capable to run the game. The streaming technology works good enough for most people, it's just a question whether the business around the service is enticing, what the multiplayer situation is like and what your personal internet situation allows you to do.

Don't count Stadia out neither. There are many people out there watching game content on Youtube. If every game video lets you play the game on display for a bit yourself on your 2009 laptop, or gives you full access for a certain price, people will get on the platform. All these business annoyances we have around Stadia and complain about; how we would be tied to the Stadia platform, having to pay for the service and the games and miss out on digital PC gamesales and have already invested in another game library and can't use mods... that's not the kind of stuff most casual folk will immediatly think about. Their 2009 laptop is suddenly playing Assassins Creed Valhalla, a game they otherwise would not be able to play. It's magic. That said, the question is whether they'll get to that point where Stadia is a thing that has been fully rolled out and most youtube-visitors will know about.

@shindig: Yeah. I'm not talking about it being pulled from the store. I'm talking about the server being shut off. Which is a far more common occurrence for older games when it's no longer profitable for a company to keep it's servers up. At some point, people won't be buying Control on Switch anymore because they'll have sold copies to everyone that'll want one, and no new money will be coming in for the publisher. But the company will never have to stop paying for the cost of running the servers, even after they've sold as many copies of the game as possible.

I have no idea how long it'd take to get to that point. It could be a year, five years, ten years. But there will inevitably be a day when it does.

why not? i would be really happy. but at the same it depends on price. if cloud based games are too expensive then it is not that interesting

Considering how often we've seen games removed from store fronts due to licensing, that would mean you'd never be able to play that game again if it was on a server and that server was just shut down. Games have their online pulled due to low amount of players even if it's not that old. Will we just see games disappear because they're not popular? I think Cloud gaming is something that can co-exist alongside traditional hardware but definitely shouldn't replace it as there are just too many questions. I'm a fan of Game Pass because I understand that I'm renting those games but with a service like Stadia, you're paying full price for something you may not have access to in the future.

God, I hope not.

We "own" less and less every year. And even if the internet in the US & Canada weren't slow, broken jokes run by corrupt, regional monopolies that overcharge and underdeliver (which they are and do), I don't like the specter of market consolidation / monopolization, and how that negatively effects markets and consumers, nor the thought of having to pay dozens of streaming services a monthly fee for the rest of my life to play any video game, past or present.

The current and future landscape of video streaming is a nightmare. I don't want that for video games.