| ninetailschris said: Nice response and thank you for reading my post. Paragraph 1: Cloud gaming doesn't depend on power. It's really based on bandwidth. That's how we are able to play high hd movies on our iPhones. Netflix is example of this. Nivida cards are irrelevant to the discussion because it's based on bandwidth of the Internet provider not the power of system. Paragraph 2: Cloud like services are expected to grow by a lot in next two three years. Paragraph 4: why would I buy a console wiiu2/ps5/xbox2 to play cloud gaming, when my iPhone can do that? You don't buy a iPhone than say "wow I really need a home phone with it." More would prefer just to use there phone where they bring it anyway with no problem and plug it up anyway. If they want they could call there friend or take pictures. If your taking about turning them into phones than they aren't consoles anymore. Sorry for double post, please merge mod if possible. |
It's an interesting topic, specially because it will become more and more dominant in the next few years. I talked about power only in a situation where we have handhelds vs. consoles without cloud gaming. For the cloud scenario (the second one), power really is irrelevant since you only have to be able to grab a controler and stream it on 1080p to a TV (and a lot of mid-end devices can do it easily).
In point 2, they will surelly grow and I think PS Now will be the first to bring it to mainstream because they have a big name. MS can follow easily since they have a big cloud infrastructure. Bandwidth wouldn't be a problem, actually 5 or 10 MB will deliver a decent quality with a little loss in quality. More than that and you will be close to the original thing. Latency is their main enemy and the only solution is having datacenters in several locations of the world. Having your cloud services on USA only, as an example, would give a horrible quality to EU or Asian users. That's a problems that has to be fixed by local datacenters. But, they already have an online game infrastructure and probably will just expand these datacenters and add cloud gaming ready servers.
Point 4: Imagine Wii U 2/PS5/XBox 2 (man, that name would be so weird for the 4th box) as a tiny and cheap box. Less than US$100. Maybe even US$ 50 with a controller. They wouldn't do any local processing, just cloud. It's a possibility because generic devices could deliver subpar experiences and people will want their cloud to be as good as a console. That means an unified controller (PS Now demands a DS3 on every device) and maybe it's easier to sell a cheap box than integrate your controller with every device. About TVs, I didn't mean they would disappear, I'm talking about something like PS Now, where you can connect your DS3 to a Bravia TV and play with just that.
The graphics you posted are amazing, it really shows the direction computing is heading right now. It is destined to become a service, like water or power distribution were you pay for "power" and don't need to know from where it is coming. Google, Apple, MS, Amazon have invested a lot in infrastructure. An example of that is ENEM, an exam that all students in Brazil do after school and counts to gain access to college (specially good universities). They had a serious infrastructure problem, since the system to consult your results is only used in a specific time of the year after the exam. It is expensive to mantain that infrastructure all the year. The solution? They changed to Windows Azure and just rent more virtuaal machines when they need it. Cloud gives you flexibility.
Returning to gaming, I see a future were we will be able to play on mobile and tablets via cloud and will have a tiny cheap box plugged on the TV to play the same games, with seamless transition between them (PS Now will already do it).
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