Pemalite said:
HoloDust said:
It is convinience - once everything is streamed, you will have the same quality whether you're home or on the go. This is one of the reasons why I see streaming hitting hard in some not so distant future.
But it's not just that - I'm fairly certain that future streaming platform holders will use the same trick that's been used throughout the history of gaming to reel in the audience - flashy visuals not possible on previous platforms. It's just that this time they can sell you different visual packages depending on how much you pay, cause you'll be paying for server proccessing time, not for actual hardware itself.
This will provide you with the choice of having something that no standalone consumer hardware would be able to pull off, if you go with, let's say, Elite package, or you can go with some other more modest package suited to your needs and budget.
I can't say I'm too happy with this future, but given how much control this gives to platform and content holders, I'd say they'll do whatever it takes to persuade audience to convert to that.
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I think streaming has a few issues to iron out before it ever becomes feasible.
Latency is a big one, streaming video games does introduce input lag... I for one do not look forward to Streaming video games as I am so far removed from any big server farms, it would be a terrible experience.
Rendering quality is another, having a compressed video feed streamed to your screen that has compression artifacts isn't as good as rendering it locally.
I do think it will happen eventually, but I don't think the *entire* planet is technically ready for it yet.
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Oh, I don't think we'll move to streaming as only or major way of gaming anytime soon - I agree, we're nowhere near technical capabilites for that - latency and bandwidth for good compression is not there yet for most of the world. But eventually, we'll get there...not that I'm too happy about it as well.
