Do gamers really want Cloud gaming?

[Chazore]

Personally, no.

I see Cloud gaming as an ultimate end to having anything within your possession in terms of having the game via disk or digital storage. With cloud gaming, everything is run and owned by the company's providing the service. It has to remain always online, always within just their control and power, while you the consumer have nothing, no control and no means of doing what you want with the games besides playing them over your internet connection.

I've known for a very long time that companies have wanted to control how we game, be it via DRM or gearing games toward an always online focus. These companies have never really liked the idea of having a product of theirs leave their grasp and into the hands of anyone that could back it up or edit it/resell it, and Cloud gaming is pretty much their means to stopping that entirely, because all you'll have with this new platform is them selling you games via a subscription service, your tv/phone/tablet and a bluetooth gamepad.

I'm not sure why people are keen on this, because while I get it, you don't like throwing down £40-60 for a game, but we've had this concept called "saving" for a long ass time now. You shouldn't want all of gaming to just reach an end point, where we're just effectively "renting" games, and facing the inevitable issues in the future, like not being able to afford your sub, losing internet connection, the internet in general going down via accidents or something akin to a war. See with digital and disk based gaming, you're at least able to bypass those issues via backups and offline play, but Cloud gaming will never have those pros, because they require an always online connection to said network, in order to even play those games.

I think some people who welcome/want it, should really give a hard and long look into what they are giving up for this kind of future, because you're not benefitting anywhere as much as the companies providing the service. They get the penultimate wish of forever warping the industry, to a point where it will never turn back.