kowenicki said:
Your last two paragraphs appear to be very contradictory. MS cant afford it but perhaps Sony could at some point? MS are one of only 3 companies (with Google and Amazon) that can even get close to achieving this. Sony cant and I doubt ever will be able to go global on this. It would be too expensive for them to lease that many servers, let alone build their own. I believe we will see Now having major issues if take up is large.
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Don't get me wrong... I dont think sony can do it. But in answering his comment, I was just pointing out that of Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony, sony are the only ones actively doing it and that what MS announced for XBO had nothing to do with this. Not once did they mention that they were gona be doing game streaming. I in no way believe that sony can do it at a scale that would support adoption that can cater to their entire user base as a service that is the primary way to play games. Nope, they can't.
However, they can do it for things like BC, and even at that they will control how many games will be in the BC list (exactly like they are doing with PSnow). This way you limit the user size by only providing older games that won't generate too much traffic and by limiting the amount of games on the service. I doub't tehre will ever be more than 100-200 games on the PSnow service much less having an entire generations catalouge. Honestly, thats the only way I see it being done cause even to use it for game rentals will be too much.
And this is not something that can work by you "leasing servers" anyone doing this doesn't just have to build servers, they have to build servers that really only serve to do just the one thing. To explain for example, if sony wanted to make it possible for 1M people to be able to stream PS4 games on PSnow, then they specifically have 1M PS4s making up the "PS4 server". Granted, this will not look anything like consumer hardware, it will basically just be stacks on stack of racks holding the PS4 MB with nothing but the APU and RAM on the board connected to high bandwidth storage that has the game installed on it. But you don't just take a xenon server rack and call it a day.
When you start to look at all these things then the cost starts to climb really fast, and the problem isn't about it being cost inhibitive. What companies as big as sony, ms, google...etc; they don't look at money the way we look at it. We say things like oh this or that company has this or that amount of billions so they can do this or that or they cant afford this or that. It doesn't work that way. If such a service requires $100B to set up and you can guarantee that you can make that money back and then some in say 3yrs, even sony has the "resources" to be able to get that kinda funding. How this thing becomes cost prohibitive isn't about who can afford it, its about there not being any acceptable way to make it profitable that will sit well with gamers. So its just bad business.
Look at Gaikai or onlive... they didnt need to be anywhere as big as anyone to start up something like this, their model was to make enough to cater to maybe 10k gamers and then grow accordingly. The issue is that the only way to make this model work is to offer it as a service. And thats where the problem comes. You can't just do a netflix and offer $10/month gaming services for "original content". It would cost more..... a lot more. Gamers would say no. Thus, you can't invest the tens of billions required just to have gamers say no. And that is why no one can do it on that scale, maybe "no one can do it" isn't the right way to put it; maybe I should be saying "no one should do it".
