CDs-Blu-Ray discs for movies or music are easier to stay for decades together with streaming services because you don't need a specific hardware to run a BD movie, any BD player regardless of its brand will run it, because the coding is standardized.

The same cannot  be said for consoles, a PS4-XONE game will only run on PS4-XONE. if Sony or MS decides at some point to get rid of their phisical consoles to welcome the cloud, each company will design its own cloud architecture and each game will need to be coded to each system. No  other manufacturer can simply build a device to run a Sony-MS game phisically. It's only up to Sony-MS.

With that said, only PC can remain with both phisical and cloud systems because the PC hardware manufacturers work in a way the coding can be standardized towards Windows - Mac.

Emulation. ;)

But the problem is: you won't be able to download the game in a cloud era, you simly play it running far away in a server. If neither Sony nor MS allows you to download their games, nothing can be done.

Piracy finds a way. It always has, since the days of cartridges.

this is corny.. really? all digital?
good luck trying to play a game you're only renting but paying full price for 10-20 years down the line when those servers that hosted your rented game(s) are offline..
the beauty of physical is just what it is.. as long as you have the game on hand and the console to play it.. you can continue to play it indefinitely.
if physical games & hardware disappear.. that will be when my 27+ years as a console gamer officially ends..

Sega always pushed stuff that was related to gameplay. In a lot of ways, their console business was a lot more like Nintendo's than the others.

you have to understand though,.. CDs are a withered technology.  as are vinyls and dvds too.   gaming is still marching along with new tech advances every decade or so.  to invest in creating a console is not a cheap endeavour and costs need to be recouped.  each generation of hardware probably needs to sell at least around 20M units in order to have any chance of recouping costs.

so either:

A) gaming technology improvements halt

B) people continue to buy new hardware at a reasonable rate.

A isn't going to happen.  as soon as B no longer becomes true physical media dies as no company is going to take on losses just to make you feel warm and fuzzy about things.  physical wont' die any time too soon but, like with CDs, the number of releases that aren't availible for purchase in physical format will increase.  stores will continue their trend of only carrying the absolute most popular titles while most content only has a digital release because they can't afford to produce the physical content without taking on extreeme losses.

I don't understand this....at all.  Its not inherently more fun to play a game from a disc than from a hard-disc drive.  This doesn't change the game, just how it gets to you.  In the 80/90/00's data on a cartridge or disc was the easiest way to get you a game, so thats how it was sold.  10 or 20 years from now, the easiest way to get you a game is going to be over a highspeed internet connection.

I don't care if they want to make me feel warm and fuzzy, It's they that care about getting my money. And if they stop with physical releases, so will my money go elsewhere. I'm sure not the only one that switched from pc gaming to console gaming and only buy pc games at extreme discounts nowadays.

If B no longer happens and consoles die, so will digital downloads, and streaming will be the future. Not a future I'm looking forward to.

4K blu-ray will be a good test to see if consumers still care about owning physical copies of movies. 4K streaming has a headstart already. Hopefully it will become at least as popular as Laserdisc. Good enough for me.

I agree that the industry is going this way, but the switch will NOT happen until all the major markets have fast enough high speed and many are not hampered with data caps. Lets face it no company wants to limit the customers it can reach.... It will happen when the infrastructure is in place. Maybe we see a physical PS5 and a PS6 is something of a hybird device?