Hehe, that 1ms target puts a real physical limit on it. As light travels at 299 million meters per second, it means it travels around 300km per millisecond. This time is needed to transport the signal from the sensors to the render-machine and the rendered image back, so the machine can only be away half that distance: 150km. And that means, no time is lost on routing, processing, rendering. So I expect in best cases, that the server cannot be more away than 50 kilometers. So, how many servers would you need to achieve that for a country like the USA? I don't think any company can shoulder that amount of investments. So higher lag is to be expected.

That may actually be a viable possibility, but is still some steps away from a technical standpoint. It would be a hybrid concept like the Switch, you can play on TV (which get's streamed images from yor phone), then take your phone and play on the go. The classical console makers will fight back for a time with exclusives. Exclusive games will become a high valued thing.

"..not as easy to use, generally higher price/performance ratio."


You can build a PC equal to the cost of consoles or lower and get better performance, not to mention that you don't need to pay a fee for online play, which adds up over time.

Not as easy to use? I guess that's subjective but using Windows 10 or a simple Linux distro is pretty darn simple and shouldn't be much harder to navigate compared to a console UI, especially with the fluidity of using a keyboard and mouse.

You can have a PC shops assemble it for you for basically no cost. And yes, it's not complicated to learn but I can see why people wouldn't want to mess with that.

Looking at the baneful games community it looks pretty dire for the future of gaming.

Consoles stay x86, and with a AMD APU going forwards.

Playstation 5 plays older PS4 games, and XB2 plays older XB1 games.

Traditional Console cycles continue.

Cloud powaaa and VR gaming 2030s.

All digital future

The local hardware can finish or adjust the image like watching 360 VR videos. There's no lag when turning your head on those since it simply sends the whole 360 video. That's pretty ineffecient and can be improved by only sending the part you could possibly see by turning your head within the roundtrip lag. Add foveated rendering with enough room to cover how fast you can move your pupils and you can reduce the bandwidth a lot too.

The tricky part is compensating correctly for lateral head movements in 3D. Perhaps you won't really notice it or you can send depth information with the image for local just in time adjustments. That depth information can also be used for depth of field corrections for eye tracking. VR streaming will need some local processing to work, but the real work can still be done far away. Head movements are very noticeable in VR, yet pulling a trigger with a 30ms delay doesn't bother anyone.

The infrastructure needs to improve a lot first. I can hardly stream one 4k 360 video at a time, which looks blurry and only runs at 30fps. 4K 120 fps per eye, is really the minimum for good VR. With 1ms latency you're looking at 1000 fps, and the human eye can benefit from 9K to 18K per eye at the 150 degrees fov of the human eye. Which sounds like a lot, yet with foveated rendering that's doable.

The traditional console will decline, but not die off. They will eventually become the cheap economy model.

Upgradeable mobile gaming platforms will continue to increase in market share until they achieve dominance. I am unsure if this industry will merge with existing mobile, as the price points will be far too high, and people generally gravitate toward more specialized hardware that gives more for less money.