Not the same, steam was a replacement for dwindling PC presence at retailers, in other words, it was a necessity. Not so with consoles. Pc gamers were getting hard to get at retail, there was no other choice. Consoles have a huge retail presence.

What if you're away from your TV set?

Dwindling PC presence came as a result of Steam. Until around 2006, the shelves at most game stores favoured the PC. That changed when word got around that you could get the same thing for up to 80% of the price on Steam. Since then, PC games here have dropped from $80 to about $30, in order for retailers to attempt to compete with Steam (still more expensive, but not by much now).

You do realize 4K will be standard in 5 years.  Do you really think most people will be able to stream that effectivly when we can barily stream 720p PS3 quality games semi-reliably?  It will be 10 years or more before what you say happens.

Glad to know the iPhone is a nintendo product. I meantioned apple products more than nintendo. My main topic was on iPhone and iPad because they actually have everything with there OS and are growing.

if you have nothing of worth to say, don't respond. Keep your console war stuff from me.

Glad to know you read the actual post!

Nice response and thank you for reading my post.

Paragraph 1: Cloud gaming doesn't depend on power. It's really based on bandwidth. That's how we are able to play high hd movies on our iPhones. Netflix is example of this. Nivida cards are irrelevant to the discussion because it's based on bandwidth of the Internet provider not the power of system.

Paragraph 2: Cloud like services are expected to grow by a lot in next two three years.

 Source:cisco

The way we deal with data is become more and more controlled by cloud storage. Many Internet providers are expected to grow to this trend to keep up with demand. Many companies like cisco are pulling for them to meet this trend.

In Japan they would have no problem meeting this demand.

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CHART  LINE  COLUMN  AREA  CANDLE  BAR

STATS  MEAN  MAXIMUM  MINIMUM  MOVING AVG  HISTOGRAM

FORECAST  ARIMA  TREND

EXPORT DATA   ADVANCED TOOLS

In the USA we are getting close. But we are doing better than predicted! Look at the jumps.

Nobody is saying the tvs will die out this gen we are saying consoles are. Do you still use your home phone or your cell phone? What about camera? Do you mail people still? Why did all things die or lose huge market share? Because one thing could do it all. Why would I not want a iPhone I could plug up to my tv and play my games. I want to buya device that does it all. Most people want the same. The less devices in the house is trend for the the future.

Paragraph 4: why would I buy a console wiiu2/ps5/xbox2 to play cloud gaming, when my iPhone can do that? You don't buy a iPhone than say "wow I really need a home phone with it." More would prefer just to use there phone where they bring it anyway with no problem and plug it up anyway. If they want they could call there friend or take pictures. If your taking about turning them into phones than they aren't consoles anymore.

Sorry for double post, please merge mod if possible.

The casual gaming market will move to things like handhelds/phones or subscription services like Playstation Now (if it gets new titles) however consoles will be fine because of the dedicated market. Sure there may be a gap between big budget titles and indie (like there is in the movie industry) but there will always be a fan base and consumers for 'high end gaming' just like PC gaming still succeeds to a degree in this now console filed market.

Even if 95% choose mobile, the world is big enough for the niche console gamer.

Sports cars and muscle cars were written of dead decades ago, Mustang Corvette still going strong. Supercars are selling more then ever. All auto companies are bringing back fun fast RWD sporti cars. Corolla sales 400k, Camery 350k, Frs/Brz 30k

So no worries Consoles will still be around. Some one will always look for a market to sale a product in.

It's an interesting topic, specially because it will become more and more dominant in the next few years. I talked about power only in a situation where we have handhelds vs. consoles without cloud gaming. For the cloud scenario (the second one), power really is irrelevant since you only have to be able to grab a controler and stream it on 1080p to a TV (and a lot of mid-end devices can do it easily).

In point 2, they will surelly grow and I think PS Now will be the first to bring it to mainstream because they have a big name. MS can follow easily since they have a big cloud infrastructure. Bandwidth wouldn't be a problem, actually 5 or 10 MB will deliver a decent quality with a little loss in quality. More than that and you will be close to the original thing. Latency is their main enemy and the only solution is having datacenters in several locations of the world. Having your cloud services on USA only, as an example, would give a horrible quality to EU or Asian users. That's a problems that has to be fixed by local datacenters. But, they already have an online game infrastructure and probably will just expand these datacenters and add cloud gaming ready servers.

Point 4: Imagine Wii U 2/PS5/XBox 2 (man, that name would be so weird for the 4th box) as a tiny and cheap box. Less than US$100. Maybe even US$ 50 with a controller. They wouldn't do any local processing, just cloud. It's a possibility because generic devices could deliver subpar experiences and people will want their cloud to be as good as a console. That means an unified controller (PS Now demands a DS3 on every device) and maybe it's easier to sell a cheap box than integrate your controller with every device. About TVs, I didn't mean they would disappear, I'm talking about something like PS Now, where you can connect your DS3 to a Bravia TV and play with just that. 

The graphics you posted are amazing, it really shows the direction computing is heading right now. It is destined to become a service, like water or power distribution were you pay for "power" and don't need to know from where  it is coming. Google, Apple, MS, Amazon have invested a lot in infrastructure. An example of that is ENEM, an exam that all students in Brazil do after school and counts to gain access to college (specially good universities). They had a serious infrastructure problem, since the system to consult your results is only used in a specific time of the year after the exam. It is expensive to mantain that infrastructure all the year. The solution? They changed to Windows Azure and just rent more virtuaal machines when they need it. Cloud gives you flexibility.

Returning to gaming, I see a future were we will be able to play on mobile and tablets via cloud and will have a tiny cheap box plugged on the TV to play the same games, with seamless transition between them (PS Now will already do it).

I to made a thread about this. Although I went more with no discs. But still requiring a chipset. I think the future isn't 100% streamed games. Its more cloud powered games. Help with processing and buying and renting all games online with no disc. But Appe wont be a big aprt of this as they are already losing huge ground in the tablet and phone market. With both the last 2 quarters Apple for the first time losing to WP8 in more than 7 countries including Spain.