LudicrousSpeed said:
lol @ the only way to play. Last I checked every game in the service is available outside of it. This is the same junk people said when EA Play launched. By now we were supposed to be in a world where every publisher had their own sub service with games locked behind it. Turns out people aren’t ready to game on the cloud. Nonsense. Even Spencer says there will always be hardware. Yep consoles are risky and so are games. All the more reason for Microsoft to maximize their revenue. Locking games behind a cloud service to play on your TV is not what a majority of gamers want. You’re confusing mobile gaming and actual gaming. Your example from another reply of the Steamdeck is just making my point. Yeah people sure love playing games on a small screen on the go. But mobile gaming and the Steamdeck aren’t the same thing, not even close. Just like Switch and mobile gaming aren’t the same thing. I respect the opinions of you guys and agree with some of what y’all are saying. Cloud will grow and become much bigger in gaming. But as MS has said in numerous interviews, it’s in addition to, not in replacement of traditional gaming with local hardware. Just because mobile gamer person is happy to play Candy Crush or RAID on their phones doesn’t mean traditional gamers are ready to play laggy and blurry versions of blockbuster traditional games on their smart TVs or phones with horrible touch controls. I stand by what I said. If you’re a fan of Xbox games or GamePass, what you guys are describing is terrible for both. |
MS' goal is to remove the lines between mobile and console gaming. That you don't want to call mobile gaming actual gaming doesn't take away from the fact that there are billions of people out there ready to be locked into a gaming subscription. Aren't Switch games actual games? That's mobile gaming as well, but still on a dedicated game box. MS wants to get rid of the box, have everyone use their server farm to game on. That is the long game.
That is has not happened yet doesn't mean it's not happening. It's not a, oh well cloud gaming doesn't quite work yet let's forget about it. MS has been steadily working on their cloud infrastructure and gaming is a perfect companion to fill in all the idle time in off work hours.
The advantages are simply too big for MS. They have the server capacity. Mobile phones don't need the highest fidelity, thus easier to render many games. The casual gamer doesn't care much about graphical fidelity either, Switch, Steamdeck, plenty people still playing on older consoles or potato PCs / laptops. Your idea of the traditional gamer is describing a niche. A niche that (used to) buy(s) a lot of games and was worth pursuing for their deep pockets, but still a niche that can't compete with the potential of half a billion gamepass subscribers.
And once the ball is firmly rolling, it becomes a lot more efficient to only release games on the Cloud. Why? One hardware spec to develop for. The advantage consoles (used to) have, allowing better optimization and not having to deal with a lot of different configurations all needing fixes and patches. Basically first party cloud games can be tailor made to the cloud hardware.
Yes, it's all quite terrible for what you and I and most people here want out of gaming. But I've had these same discussions on blu-ray / movie forums in 2006, and look where we are now. People go for convenience and (no up front) price, picture quality a distant third. And input lag, the avg person doesn't even know what that means.
Yes, for now, every game is still available for download to run locally. Physical releases, much harder to get nowadays if at all. With more and more focus on live service, soon the download part will become a nuisance when you can instantly stream the game directly with the latest updates on any device you have gamepass on.
Don't listen to mouthpieces. Spencer contradicts himself all the time, and yes there will always be hardware in the cloud and hardware you stream the games to ;) Accessories will come for buttons and analog sticks (are already here). But games will also change to fit the common denominator better, which will be streaming in the future.
Yes, it's terrible, but that what's Spencer is selling with Gamepass. That's the way to make gamepass profitable.
