Will gaming move 100% to the cloud? *spawn

The original premise that started this thread was that moores law stopped or at least fell of a cliff. In my opinion if that happens then people will end up with the best technology in their home. They will just devote more space to it. I would certainly have a closet dedicated to a high end gaming rig or at least a fridge sized system.

If the only way to increase graphics and performance is to go bigger with more video cards and more cpus instead of continuing to shrink well the cloud blades will have to adopt the same thing wouldn't they ? Which means that developers will target that too

 

I can see console gaming disappearing into the clouds, but Medium to High End PC gaming will not, It will always remain there. Sadly cloud will hinder the progression of graphics/game design, as cloud hardware will be replaced/upgraded less often, and it will come with it's own baggage of live service shenanigans and microtransactions. AAA games will transform into the abominable mobile model to appeal to the "masses". In other words: this will dumb down game design and graphics.

 

And spur a renaissance in quality indie games made exclusively for PC.

 

In fairness, the metric wasn't defined and people can be at cross purposes. For me, the idea is if gaming, certainly mainstream, will move away from local boxes towards streaming from servers. Kinda like asking, "will music move to 100% CDs?" and, "will music move to 100% digital?" The 100% isn't an absolute target, so with music moving to CDs, in real terms, yeah it did, even if 5%of the industry was laggards listening to their crackly LPs or buying tapes for the car tape-player.

Whether there's a stoic market for ultra high-end hardware or not isn't that important to whether consoles disappear and the barriers to that happening. I kinda hope by that point, there are industrial caps on the power consumption of gear for environmental reasons - we're supposed to be reducing climate change factors and the notion of multi-GPU monster² gaming rigs needing 10x the silicon to get 10x the power, does not sit well with that!

 

I expect this feature will eventually find its way onto Xbox Console apps as well as the standalone applications.

Xbox article entry on it: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2021/11/29/clarity-boost-with-xbox-cloud-gaming-on-edge-browser/

Today, we are excited to invite you to experience Clarity Boost, one of the latest cloud gaming optimizations available on Microsoft Edge Canary. This feature uses a set of client-side scaling improvements to improve the visual quality of the video stream. Download Microsoft Edge Canary today to try out these features! Clarity Boost will be available to all Microsoft Edge users by next year.

 

Overbuild a little, but not that much since MS is obviously going to stagger AAA releases on GamePass, for instance. As indicated earlier - 10% of the required hardware is a huge win even if it turns out to really be 15% or something to build in some "peak time" protection. The cost will all be in the subscription.

I realize a lot of peeps here are very much guarding their uber PC gaming rigs with their lives and fearing the "Day of the Cloud", but I think if we're being objective there's huge upsides to Cloud gaming that 80%+ of the potential gaming audience will appreciate.

Maybe there will still be individual AAA releases 15 years from now like Sony is doing, but I'm not betting on it. I suppose there are a few people still buying the latest Marvel movies on BluRay instead of subscribing to Disney+, but that ship is sailing away for most people IMO.

With that said, the two can co-exist. GamePass on cloud blades and AAA individual titles on consoles/PC, but I think the economics heavily favour the former.

PS: Eastmen, you're the last guy I thought would be betting against Cloud-Blades.

 

So is this the future we have to look forward to as a PC gamer?

3080-level Cloud PC $20/month
Game Pass $10/month + mtx
Ubisoft+ $15/month + mtx
EA Plus $15/month + mtx
TakeTwo+ $15/month + mtx
Kotick+ $15/month + mtx
1 full price game every 3 months $20/month
Steam backlog sales $20/month

 

That's the direction movie streaming is heading in. Every content provider wants to stream directly to the consumer and cut out the middle man. Hopefully with games it's more like Netflix than Disney+. It's highly unlikely that every big game publisher is going to want to run their own cloud service.

 

Yea but MS can do that if they only have to worry about their games. How many third parties are going to be willing to step off holiday releases ? Some months we get dozens of games launched.

I'm also not against cloud. I think its just another tool in the belt , not the only tool

 

Can see a future where PS/Xbox are going to be just services, and where high-end local gaming would become niche. Its not i like that idea, but it just makes sense.

 

Cloud doesn't mean full price individual software sales will disappear. Games can release as they always have and then transitioned to a subscription service with a release date that works for that service's schedule.

For MS, its a matter of targeting the holidays with their biggest release and fill the first 10 months with releases in a way that maximizes engagement.

But I see local hardware as always being a part of the landscape. A big ass high priced box may off put many mainstream gamers but its not like that doesn't exists anyways in the PC space. Plus you have to produce the hardware for the service. Might as well sells the hardware to the most dedicated gamers and make a few dollars.

 

Under the new paradigm, some publishers are going away IMO. Not everyone is going to survive. EA has already rolled into GamePass. Ubisoft might be next. Take Two will hold out as long as they can, but MS is headed to 30 studios/60 dev teams in the next 5-10 years.

60 dev teams cranking out a AAA game every 5 years is 12 AAA titles per year. More likely they'll ship a AAA game every 2 months and a AA game every month as well for variety once they get going.

Even look at the release schedule for MS lately - Flight Sim in July, Psychonauts 2 in August, Age of Empires IV in October, Forza Horizon 5 in November, Halo Infinite in December.

Sony will likely have to follow a similar model at some point. They're just trying to hold out as long as possible. They're hoping MS fails with GamePass, but I don't think that's going to happen.

In the long run we're probably looking at different subscription tiers from $15/month to $30, but free hardware.

 

So lets imagine this. COD , Battlefield , halo and destiny sequels all launch between the end of Sept and the end of Nov. That's just those games , there will be a few dozen other games released then also. So how much over build do they need to do to handle all this ?

Like I said at big MMO or multiplayer games services still crash and that is with the end user having their own hardware to run the game.

 

Steam had 120m active users last year, peaked at 27m concurrent users this year. That's 22.5% of their active user base.

Personally I have trouble seeing a single game streaming service beating Netflix's 200m or so subscribers. 45 million units of cloud hardware would be the absolute max for any given service at Steam concurrent user peak?

(Can't account for Steam's user growth over a year as don't have those figures)

 

Are we really counting moms with phones playing gem matching games as potential CoD cloud gamers?