Cloud Games + Fiber vs. Physical/Downloaded Games

[hinch]

Azzanation said:

Captain_Yuri said:

Except it's not that rare of a chance. We have had a number of examples of cloud streaming services shutting down in the past and we have no idea what SE's track record will be. Considering how anti-consumer this industry can be, it's not a bad thing to advise people of the downsides if they are going to buy a cloud game from a company that has yet to have a good enough track record to be considered a safe purchase. And because with cloud streaming only, if the company decides to stop it's cloud service, you literately lose everything... If this was say xCloud or PSNow, it would be a different story as I have said good things about them in the past but those are subscription based that nets you a ton of games every month, allows you to download games onto your device if you have a console and have a good track record.

Netflix is also not the same thing. Yes it's streaming but subscription services like Netflix offer a ton of content for a low monthly price. The topic at hand is buying an individual cloud only game for a full price.

Well that's where the choice remains up to the individual. Buying a game off a unknown service with only having the option to stream will obviously net some warnings. However if you were to pay a sub to stream games (Renting the service) i see no issue with it what so ever. 

A good example of your point is Google Stadia, which only offers the service as you have to pay full price for the games to own and can only than be streamed, however if Google ever plans on shutting down the service, i believe their would be either refunds granted or law suits that would take place. However if Stadia falls, most likely something like Google Stadia will continue to operate only for access to already owned content by coexisting customers or Google can simply change the hands of the service to someone else to allow current customers access. Its not as simple as they will shut the service down and screw over paid customers. Especially for a half trillion dollar company who can afford to maintain the service. The only real scenario where they can shut it down and everyone losers, is if Google went bankrupt which we know the chances of that happening, probably not in our life times. 

Google doesn't have the best track record of keeping their (non successful) services alive tbf - https://killedbygoogle.com/ I bought a bunch of music on Google Music only for the service to be shut down. The thing is having games physically in your collection is way different than having access to play them remotely on a cloud server. Where you have complete control over one, the other well.. is well out of your hands entirely.

Personally after my experience with cloud media including some games being pulled from stores, I wouldn't touch cloud gaming with a barge poll. Ymmv of course.

Last edited by hinch - on 16 October 2021