Prediction:The future is handheld gaming, consoles will die this gen.

[FlamingWeazel]

fordy said:

TheFallen said:
-A lot of countries still have data caps on usage. Streaming these games will be as bad as streaming HD video and use a lot of bandwith.

-A large number of people like to own their games and have physical copies.

-Server go down or shut down your screwed.

-Technology for the games is not quite there for mainstream adoption and latency is still an issue.

A lot of countries also have ISPs that allow free data from particular sites. I'd be betting without a doubt that these would be severely pushed by companies to become a member of these..

I think Steam has proven that many will backpedal on their principles for the right price. I think steam/cloud gaming has the potential to screw the consumer badly from corporate interests, so watch it get heavily pushed/discounted until it becomes the mainstream format (could be a couple of years or a couple of decades, but I'm talking in ultimate terms)

I think that server farms/mass redundancy the way places like Google do would ensure downtime is kept to an absolute minimum. Shutting down services is when it will get fun in the courts (see: What the consumer owns vs what the consumer rents as service).

The technology is already here, the problem is its rollout. Until last September, my country was rolling out Fibre to the Home technology. That's on the backburner at the moment, but both corporate and consumer demand will force them to complete it properly.

Steam is not cloud gaming................................