IcaroRibeiro said:
Preserve games? Those games will be deleted from existence just because they are shutting down the store? I doubt it Tip: There is absolute no way for a game to disappear in digital world. You can be sure o that, and that's more of a issue for media creators than for consumers About games from past gens still being playable, that's why emulation exists. Cloud gaming will solve all those problems near in the future. Always online is truly an annoyance in current days, but it won't be forever let alone in 2040 or 2050 The planned obsolence of hardware is what really make me anxious for cloud gaming just take over. Digital stores being closed are bad, but I agree hardware that stop working is unsolvable without more hardware. The idea behind this is your hardware must stop working ASAP, so you buy more hardware. If you hardware doesn't die, then shut down stores and, if the game has potential buyers, release it as a remaster in the next hardware and repeat. I'm just waiting Sony to release their first collections of PS2 and PS3 games for PS5 lol In a cloud world this thing won't happen. All the disposable tech will be somebody else's problem to deal with, for customers it will be as transparent as choose a movie on Netflix |
With cloud gaming, what games are available and when will be decided by the publishers. Many less popular games are bound to be missing, some games will be missing due to rights issues (No One Lives Forever famously still has no digital release anywhere), and some games will be missing seemingly for no reason. When you don't pay for access to any particular games, individual games are bound to be taken down occasionally. Additionally, there will be a split between different cloud services.
Streaming movies isn't really my thing (I don't watch them enough to justify paying for any subscription), but I bet the issues I described are already there for movies - except that it's technically much easier to distribute both old and new movies, because they all run 'natively' on the same hardware. For games, you start from needing several kinds of hardware because server hardware cannot natively run all games ever made. The situation can be improved by emulation, but it brings its own issues as well. Then there's the fact that you might need to ensure that everything runs properly, especially if using emulation. It's quite a bit more work than with movies, I imagine. The bottom line, to me, seems to be that there probably are tons of issues even with streaming movies, and it's going to be even worse with games. It'll get better, but the only thing cloud gaming will be great for is new games, and lag might still be an issue for some games (for many locations at least). Ideally cloud gaming could largely solve the problem, but I'm not so optimistic about it.
