| mornelithe said: Quite honestly, for places that have the bandwidth I don't see why having cloud assisted computing can't work (limited at first, given latency, but will improve over time). The concern I have is those countries that have bandwidth caps, or simply piss poor broadband infrastructure (of which there are many). Are we now going to shift from the hardware dependent performance variation that we see in PC, to bandwidth dependent performance variation with the cloud? And if a country has poor bandwidth/data caps...is the game going to be unplayable/substantially downgraded? |
I live in a country with data caps.
However, Microsoft struck a deal with most internet providers here to have the data captured over Akami for Xbox Live, made data-free so it doesn't effect your data caps, internet providers then advertise the "feature" to draw in customers. (Providers like Internode, Westnet, Netspace, iiNet come to mind.)
They also have a similar deal with Steam, but Sony is pretty much missing from the equation.
So if you have a data cap, pressure your internet provider or look for alternate providers that have such services as data free or better yet, unlimited data.
The main issue I find with cloud computing is one of game longevity, there are people all around the world who enjoy pulling out a 15-20 year old console, plugging it in and having fun, if games become reliant on the cloud, then essentially retro gaming could be killed if it doesn't have an offline mode, because lets face it, what company is going to keep gaming servers up for several decades? It's a cost burden and that's not a good thing in the long term for a business.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
