Game streaming is not the Future, here's why

[binary solo]

I don't see streaming going above 1080p very quickly. If you want to play in 4K then buy a game the usual way.

If streaming becomes the mainstream then new games will go straight to the streaming service. As of now, because it's not the main source of gaming revenue companies like Sony only put back catalogue stuff on streaming. But that will change as the model becomes a larger segment of the market.

As streaming becomes mainstream new game design techniques and hardware will be developed that facilitates the ability of one hardware unit servicing more than one gamer at the same time. No one has tried to do this yet because there's never been any need for it. If a high end gaming rig is capable of 4K gaming with high quality graphics and with a lot of action happening on screen, then that gaming rig will have a lot of spare capacity when much less demanding games are being run on it, including the same game at 1080p with lower graphics setting. It just requires more effort to be put into parallell processing. We already have the same game being made available in different levels of quality with the PC/Console split. If people know they have 24/7 access to a library of thousands of games, they will be willing to game at 1080p, or even 900p or 720p as a trade off for access to more games than they could ever hope to own. And of course because people don't game 24/7 the idea of 1 hardware unit for one subscriber is ridiculous. If the average gamer games 4 hours per day then that already drops the number of hardware units down to 1 hardware unit per 6 subscribers (assuming a roughly even distribution of subscribers across the time zones).

What you have listed are just a set of technical challenges that will have a solution, provided there is a good business case and a clearly identifiable path to profitability. Onlive proved the concept was possible, and it will probably take a few other companies to try and fail before the first truly viable game streaming business gets going. But I have little doubt that it will happen, it will become mainstream and it will happen sooner than people think.

Indeed streaming + VR seem to have a natural fit. With streaming you can make the home based processor very cheap, and thus put more of the cost and quality into the headset. This would overcome one of the hurdles associated with VR because right now you have to buy an expensive console (or PC) AND a probably fairly expensive VR headset. But if you can buy a console for $99 then this makes VR much more accessible.