Exactly, I don't get the thinking behind "this must die", isn't it better to try to find a better way to keep something like that?

Technically developers have already made their money from the game when it was new. You don't send money back to a car company when you sell your car you brought new, so what's wrong with selling your games on to someone else if you're not using them?

Economics dictates how many copies of a game a retailer is going to buy, because they can only sell so many.

Personally I've never done trading in or even bought 2nd hand games, but I'm not against the industry having that.

Maybe developers and publishers should give gamers another option, like they have their 2nd hand system, where you can sell games back to them & then they can make something off of that, just like car retailers can buy back your used car or you trade it to them for money off of a new model and they can sell 2nd hand directly, earning money for Sony and other publishers.

Sony and other publishers should dip their toes into the 2nd hand market and then they'd geta piece of the pie. ;)

Maybe developers shouldn't charge so much for some games and they shouldn't have such ridiculously high budgets, I mean Ninja Theory are making Hellblade for a small budget, they'll probably profit day one from it, indies don't expect such huge bottom lines, so why can't AAA developers be more productive with their budgets?

When WiLD can be the size of Europe, made by a small team of like a dozen people and look like it does, probably cost less than a million dollars to make a AAA dev should be able to make multiple projects that size or smaller for the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars they may spend on developing a game.

Industries only die if they don't try hard enough to work!

You have FAR too much faith in capitalists.

After almost 9 years on the market, how many people who want one haven't bought one?
When this service goes worldwide, that number will shrnk even more. That's why i think that offering something that the market isn't offering already would be a better solution as there's no competition to divide people.

I always heard that one of the dangers of streaming something is the delay. If that comes from not so good internet connections or server flaws... what matters is if in the end the service is as flawless as possible and how many people (worldwide) can actually use it in a way to be satisfied with the service.

So far, OnLive tried and without success. If Sony can avoid those issues you mentioned, then the service might have a future.

Now if only it was actually properly available outside of the US in any device..

Funny political statement... without capitalism we wouldn't have:

1.) Video games in general.
2.) First party games
3.) Competitive pricing. (PS3 and XB1 wouldn't have had such major price drops, etc)
4.) Indie developers
5.) Much much more

To clear things up, one of the biggest reasons DLC is as rampant today as it is... is the used game market (and to a limited extent piracy). When a game is only 2 months old, and someone buys a used copy for $5-15 less than a new copy -- the publisher/developer gets ZERO revenue. However, they are still expected to support it with patches, content updates, and online play.

PS: The whole argument about used cars isn't the same as video games. OEMs make very large margins on each car they sell -- and continue to earn money over time via parts, and maintenance (hint DLC... hint).

It is correct actually. 

No, I fully understand it, I have worked with it in the past, and I use a similar system with the business I work for now, however I don't directly maintain the servers or intranet. I was baffled by your comments because they are asinine. 

The point is that the servers are already there and expanding. It's not a direct initial start up cost. Much of the cost has already been amassed and will continue to expand. It's the same any any server network. They don't need the same equivelants of PS4 hardware in any way shape or form (not that it's a high end product anyway). In fact, in many ways through virtualization they could get away with less because they could use upscaling on the user end and possibly stream the game in a lower rez. So yeah, the servers cost a lot of money, over time, but they can almost instantly start making they money back on the investment.

As far as the ping is concerned, you need to look into PSNow as it is. Let me help you. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/01/22/playstation-now-review-sony-finally-proves-streaming-gaming-is-viable/2/ Goto the second page and watch the video. Yeah, there are still issues with it, but as I said before, technology is advancing at a crazy rate and will continue to do so, especially on the badwidth front with the likes of what Google is doing, it's insane! Plus other providers are having to compete since Google Fiber and the likes keep expanding. 

Nearly every large company uses servers and have their own intranet, many use very graphically intensive services, think gaming studios and publishers as well as studios like Pixar and Dreamworks. That way all the content they create can be fully controlled with less chances of leaks and the like. 

Sony is a very large company and they already have massive amounts of servers and satellite servers set up for their services already, lots of it will just be allocation. 

If you cannot see how this could very possibly be a potential future for Playstation you are just being blind and/or ignorant. 

As much as I dislike what Pachter has said at times, he's not as dense as a lot of poeple like to think he is, and even he said in ten years time consoles will be a thing of the past, likely due to this kind of advancement. How many people do you think are holding off on buying a PS4 because of the cost? If they could get a Blu-Ray player that can stream the games for a fraction of the cost do you really think that it would not be a huge success? The PS3 is still selling quite well even at its cost, this would negate that and give more profit to sony directly through the subscription and rental systems in place. All that would need to be added is a Dual Shock controller and the ability to stream PSNow, which they are already working on. 

The costs are a fact, if you want to provide the processing power for millions of people on day one then you have to have a network for that many people on launch day, this is an inarguable fact!

Right now Sony has zero PS5 customers, on launch day they would have millions, so they don't already have the servers for that, each customer is probably going to need at least 20 TFlops of processing performance (if not double that), multiply that by say the 3 million base point I used and you have 60 million TFlops that you need on launch day, whatever that costs is how much money Sony needs to make to break even on the new PS5 server/cloud based system, when it launches.

I used the PS4 example because it's technology around right now, it should have been obvious that I wasn't specifically relating that to what Playstation 5 will have for it's processing architecture, as an asside you can't use the Playstation 3 technology used in PSNow and say that will run PS5 games, the network would be useless for any X86 based games.

FYI Sony's servers made for services aren't there for anything but streaming video, music or a small install base of PSNow/PS3 games & maybe some legacy PS2, PS1, PSP and possibly Vita games somewhere down the line.

PS3 is like 250Gflops, say 2 million people use PSNow (which is probably a massive over estimation, since it's not a global network yet and the install base is pretty small right now), that's 500,000,000 GFlops or 500,000 TFlops, nothing compared to the amount of power all of the PS4's current install base uses.

The processing demands for Music and Video are miniscule compared to even the PS3 install base using PSNow or any legacy video games, the processing demands for PS4 are being handled by local hardware in people's homes, because it's not currently cloud based, nor is there any signs that it will be any time soon and even if it does eventually happen PS5 will be a whole order of magnitude greater in the demands placed on a server network, because it requires much more power to run.

PS4 is like 2TFlops overall in how powerful a single APU is, there's currently like 22-23Million gamers using those consoles (they're not on servers), the demands are spread out around the globe in people's homes or wherever those consoles are, it's currently at 44-46 million Teraflops, the Playstation 5 launch day requirements for processing performance as I said could easily be 60 million Teraflops, that's an addition, not something Sony already has in place, they don't have a server network in place right now that can handle that much processing demand for a purely gaming based application.

In order to make sure you have no issues with demand on launch day you'd have to basically overestimate what you're going to need, it could easily be 100 million Teraflops, if you want a million or 2 million person buffer to make sure server strain isn't too high.

My comments aren't asinine at all, you are inventing things to try to fit your argument making out like Sony already has the servers to handle this, really?

Like there's no investment required?

LMFAO, you haven't got a clue what you're talking about and no you don't deal with this stuff, because if you did then you would understand what I'm saying, even Google doesn't have 100,000 Petaflops of server performance at their fingertips and to claim that Sony can just magic up that kind of power with the servers they need to add that for it to be there on launch day, they can't just allocate from a server network they don't have or that they can't buy from some cloud service provider, they'd need to build it and no it's not a gradual investment kind of thing, you don't want to have sit on a multi billion dollar investment for say a year or 2 before you make a return.

My point still stands, you haven't made a single argument that works against it.

Sony makes the physical hardware, builds it ready to deliver on day one, the install base has paid for their consoles on day one, Sony earns their investment back on day one of launch, after maybe a few months because they've had to build up enough consoles to ship at launch.

The cloud system has to be paid through a subscription based business model over months, to a year after launch. Sony can't expect the same kind of initial outlay by the customer on launch day, because they simply won't buy it, so they're probably waiting for at least a year before they even break even on their initial investment on the server network.

Then there's the issue of having to upgrade the network to keep up with demand, so they have to continue to make the same kind of initial investments on every customer they have to provide for, while waiting at least a year per customer to get their money back, because of this poor decision to go down the server route for providing their new cloud experience.

All this time customers are moaning when the network goes offline, when they have latency issues and eventually the Playstation business is so tarnished that Sony are no longer the market leader.

This would be an utter failure.

The physical hardware is a known entity, it's as guaranteed a way to make money back on your investment as you can on launch day & all you have to do is make sure you have a decent enough spec system, at a reasonable value for money price point, along with games (be it exclusives or multiplats or indies) on launch day, something Sony have handled fine for 4 out of 5 generations of their home console system.

Nothing you've said is backed by any shread of a fact, in fact all facts relating to this topic agree with what I'm saying, even a PS4 network for the entire current install base using the cloud would be highly expensive and wouldn't be a great investment, because it would take too long to earn Sony the money back.

As I've said Sony doesn't have the servers for that.

I'm not sure how a rental service (blockbuster) vs a streaming service (Netflix) relates to what we're discussing at all. PSNow is a rental streaming service lol is that what you're getting at?

And if Sony did equip a TV with a ps4 built inside then literally everything you've argued becomes a moot point. This entire discussion is based on the concept that I don't see physical hardware disappearing anytime soon. If they did make a real PlayStation TV I'd like to see a renaming of the brand or a different product name for the TV. PlayStation is fine and dandy but it doesn't sound sleek, which is something you'd want when looking at the latest and greatest 4K equipped OLED LCD TVs.

Ummm. What? It has nothing to do with a PS4 being equiped in a TV, it has to do with PSNow being accessable to the TV and Bluray and whatever else they decide to add it to, PS TV maybe? This is what they are already working on and will be released soon. It would be no different than any of the multitiude of smart TV's, blurays or set top boxes that have the 'netflix' sticker on them that shows that they have the app to connect and watch netflix. It's just streaming so all it is, is an app with the build in protocol to access and use the app whether it's netflix, iTunes or PSNow. It likely won't carry the Playstation Brand other that Playstation Now, or just PSNow depending how they want to market it.

You seem to have no understanding that technology is not broken up in generations. It is an ever evolving thing. By me saying PSNow could be the 'next gen' it would not be the PS5 per se, but it would be the 'next gen'. There would be no direct release as it's already released and is already evolving, growing and expanding. 

Anyway, you don't seem to understand how much of this work, that's fine. I strongly urge you to do some research into it. However as far as this conversation is concerned, it's over. I'm moving on, I suggest you do as well.