Yeah eventually, but not because it will be better than physical hardware but because it would be more convenient, it will keep cost down, and will do away with used game sales. Physical will always have the upper with games, because of the nature of its quick calculation but streaming will be good enough eventually to forgo physical console.

Offloading calculations to servers is defiantly the future, regardless of that being simple matchmaking or the full games. I really agree with you that "teh cloud" is the future of gaming even on high end PCs.

From the other thread I just disagree with what it will be used for, how soon it will be used, and who is using it ;)

Cloud has some problems:

1. Speed and access to bandwidth doesn't seem to be growing as quickly as consumer computing power is.

2. People tend to want a sense of ownership over their content. Cloud computing tends to be more of a service than a product.

3. More processing power has always been more of a marketing gimmick than a necessary ingredient for quality games.

4. Moving to a cloud + thin client model may have a stifling effect on the development of new interfaces by fundamentally changing the generation cycle.

That is fine on you disagreeing with me  about certain things XD lol  Im only using opinions and everybody has a different opinion :)

The cloud used to be the future when forum-users thought Sony would have the upper hand on it, because they paid 400 million USD for Gaikai.

Now that they realise that the IT-infrastructure and cloud computing technologies MS offer are vastly superior than anything Gaikai could have ever been, it is just a fad / PR talk or something these users try to make fun of.

The reality is oh so different. The fact that Nvidia, the ones making money from selling you expensive GPUs, try to use the cloud for their products gives you an idea how important this will become. Maybe not in the next 2-3 years, but the foundation will be made for decades to come.

This is like online multiplayer on consoles. At first there were only a handful of games supporting XBL (or Dreamarena... but yeah... XBL) Heck, EA even blocked it. Now it is an essential part of gaming and the game they sell. Same thing will happen with cloud computing for games. Yeah, not everyone will be ready from the start, but not everyone was ready when XBL required broadband in 2002 either.

Not for me, if the cloud becomes the only way to play games Ill just stick to retro gaming.

You mean the same Cloud already used in games today? Nothing will change... at least not in ten or more years.

The cloud is going to be like slapping online multiplayer in this gen. while the cloud can be a valuable asset, there are going to be several big titles that uses the cloud as a form of DRM. heck, it has already started to be integrated for a while now with MMOs( the servers holding up the virtual economy, most of the missions and the map) and the recent fiasco SimCity. I would like the Cloud to be restricted to MP games only but companies like EA are going to shoehorn it into Single player affairs. At least I think I can trust Nintendo to keep there single player games functional without the cloud

Sadly, the cloud will be the future... of EVERYTHING...

Anyone seen this?

http://youtu.be/aiWdJxshWMM