spemanig said:
I mean, first, we already have flying cars. They're called helicopters. Jokes aside, this won't be the future - it's literally already happening. This is like when people try to deny the already-happening abandonment of physical media. It's not the future - it's now. Game streaming already is happening now. To pretend that people won't adopt the clearly more convenient option more and more over time as the technology gets better is like owning a SNES, claiming that 3D gaming will never take off because it would be too complicated and ugly, blind to the 3D games already existing in parallel, improving in fidelity everyday. "VR will never take off - Just look at how bad the Virtual Boy is! Cellphones will never take off - just look how big they are! Online video will never take off - look at how few people have good internet connection! Technology will never improve past what it currently is!" Come on, dude. What a nightmare playing any game you want in a second just by having your friend text it to you would be. What Google is doing here is revolutionary to a magnitude far greater than what most people can appreciate. |
... but VR hasn't taken off. It's carved out a little niche for itself and isn't any closer to breaking into the mainstream now than it was a decade ago. In all seriousness, PSVR is by far the most popular VR device on the planet, and after 3 years, it still hasn't broken 4 million in sales - making it much less mainstream today than Kinect was of yesteryear. Just like Racing Wheels. Racing wheels are an extremely successful business for those who cater to it, but very niche market that will never, ever, ever be mainstream no matter how cheap or how epic racing wheels and racing setups get. Vr has its place in gaming, but it's not next almost every playstation or xbox or gaming PC that can run it, that's very clear at this point.
So it doesn't matter that game streaming is here. It's been here for quite some time. The question is - will streaming ever become a serious competitor to a PC or console experience? Will the average gamer strongly consider a streaming service like Google Stadia instead of buying a PS5 or a Switch or a PC? If not - if it just carves out some other niche or grows into some other market and the people that would be Playstations or Xboxes or Nintendos, or plunk $500 on a Graphics Card on their PC, or spend an extra $200 on a monitor because it supports G-Sync, well, they keep on like they've been keeping on, and don't see Stadia or any other game streaming service as a platform genuinely worth their time - then Stadia or any other gaming service isn't "the future" for those gamers, is it?
Everything has it's advantages and disadvantages, and I've yet to hear a compelling case why the advantages of Stadia should have Sony, MS, or nVidia to name a few looking over their shoulders given all of those disadvantages that are still present and continue to be present in streamed gaming solutions. I don't think someone that's unwilling to drop $200 on a PS4 is going to be willing to drop $60 on the latest assasin's creed to play on their TV, or tablet, or smartphone while dragging a little controller everywhere just to play only to have to deal with such a volatile play experience from a company that is gathering as much data as they can off of them in the process and has a history of pulling the plug on massive projects regardless of what that means to the affected customers.
