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If cloud becomes mandatory in 3-5 years

What you will do?

  • Keep playing and migrate to cloud(geforce, Xbox, PS or whathever)

    Votes: 7 6.3%
  • Keep playing until your local hardware lasts

    Votes: 90 80.4%
  • Quit game and move to a new hobby

    Votes: 15 13.4%

  • Total voters
    112

Sanepar

Member
Since everything is pointing on this direction of mandatory cloud in near future what you guys planning to do?

For me is a good bye, cloud limit hours and are more expensive.

I think these companies will try something similar to discs decision to enforce cloud because they will have all control.
 
I would just play on the hardware I had. I wouldn't migrate to cloud only.

Cloud gaming has very little benefits and is more expensive. I still need to buy the individual games, but I also need to pay a cloud subscription every month to access my games. Not to mention I could be placed in a queue to play the games I pay for, plus there will be limits on how many house you can use the service each month. Oh, and the quality isn't as good as local hardware.

How is that better? You'd have to be a nimrod to think cloud gaming is superior to local hardware.

If that's the future of gaming then I'm out.
 
the day it becomes mandatory to stream games is the day I would probably stop. I like having my own compute power but these pricks seem determined on owning all the memory, all the compute and all the infrastructure.
 
The market won't switch to all cloud if it has any visible/notable downgrade than traditional method.

Mass adoption will only happen when it will become as good as streaming from PC to your TV.
 
Cloud gaming is nothing more than an exploratory option presently. There has to be outweighting consumer support for it to go as the main form of gaming. It's not going to be the main form of gaming because some companies would say fuck you take this or nothing else. They would just fail and someone else will take over that spot.
 
I can only hope that cloud gaming, if that ever really takes off, only means that you can still buy actual hardware even if it's just unsubsidized and expensive.

If not, then that's it for gaming for me, I guess.

I don't see it becoming mandatory, though... its just the usual corporate speak; these suits can't seem to help but think of a world where everyone pays a subscription. If cloud gaming ever was to take off, it would have already; the barrier for entry has long since been the lowest of all gaming options for almost 16 years now... There have always been a great number of providers in that industry too.

So I don't know or see what is suddenly gonna change in 3 years to make everyone say... yeah, I am gonna go to the cloud. Prices? Nope, this is just what the suits tell themselves to be able to sleep at night when they think of the price prohibition of the rampocalype. They go, well, if people can no longer afford actual hardware, they would jts play on the cloud. Sounds like what you would say when trying to comfort shareholders. it won't work, though.
 
If gaming goes into the cloud, I'll keep playing my old shit locally until I die. And if people ever figure out how to emulate cloud backends locally (which they will. Most private MMO servers do exactly that, for example), then I will use that method to play newer games.
 
Went with option B, even though I don't think it'll ever get to that.

At worst dedicated hardware will still remain, but as a much more luxurious and expensive thing.
 
I can only hope that cloud gaming, if that ever really takes off, only means that you can still buy actual hardware even if it's just unsubsidized and expensive.


How should I tell you...

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If this shit happens I might lose it. I don't see myself ever stopping gaming but this REALLY is the nail in the coffin
I'm more concerned with the liberation of mobile devices that only GrapheneOS seems to give a shit and home compute on any level and going to corporations just to open up a damn note doc
 
As someone who doesn't live near a major server hub, cloud gaming is not a viable option for me. I will never use it.

I think this is just fear mongering though. I don't see any publisher making their games available exclusively through the cloud and not offering a digital download on Steam and PS Store.
 
Cloud only games dont exist for me, if everything went cloud i'd just play what i have plus retro (whaptever retro was at the time).

That said, that aint happening. The barrier to developing games is pretty low and there still would be people making local games if only because that is what was possible to them.

As for hardware, you still need a minimally decent hardware even to stream, usually one more than capable of playing retro at the very least. I'd worry less about this and more about every hardware alternative becoming locked down like mobile and consoles. My personal hope is that this either doesnt happen, which thankfully still hasn't show signs of going through at least in the PC space (even with MS hellbent on enshitifying windows, you're still fully free to install whatever OSs you like), or that by the time it happens we'll have retro hardware alternatives or FPGAs that are capable of playing games from until at least the current gen.
 
It might not have to become mandatory if it becomes significantly more economical. I mean right now it would take nearly 5 years of Geforce Now Premium to hit the price of a PS5....

No upfront cost either...can pause/cancel anytime.
 
It might not have to become mandatory if it becomes significantly more economical. I mean right now it would take nearly 5 years of Geforce Now Premium to hit the price of a PS5....

No upfront cost either...can pause/cancel anytime.
Limited to only 100h month. I play between 150-200h everymonth.
 
I will stick with old games which i already do atm.

I only buy if i am happy with a product offering for my money, not because a company things i have to do x to play something.
 
It wont. Whoever believes cloud is the future barely know their own city. If even first world countries have connection issues, why these clowns believe that, magically everyone will have a good connection and time to lose into subscriptions... case in point, we can see that lots of subscriptions today that need price increase to keep this 'infinite growth'.
 
Limited to only 100h month. I play between 150-200h everymonth.
That's avg of 5 to 6.5 hours every day with no days off. Most people are not playing that much.

100 month is 3.3 hours everyday with no days off. Most people can get away with that.
 
Limited to only 100h month. I play between 150-200h everymonth.
The funny thing is, charging per hour would effectively kill the current most profitable live service business models of games. It works because its a casual time investment, but that would change the moment players had to ponder over things like dollar-per-hour investments. There are good reasons why GAAS didnt go with subsctiption and instead ended up with f2p and mtx.
 
It's nice as a hypothetical; however, there isn't sufficient data infrastructure within the next 3-5 years to make it likely.

Basically, there's no way companies can achieve this at scale in the immediate future, without taking losses.
 
Cloud won't become mandatory in 3-5 years. The economics of cloud gaming make that impossible.

Too many people seem to think that streaming games isn't that different from streaming tv shows and that any server can be used for cloud gaming or that cloud gaming must be a more lucrative business model than selling hw to consumers. All wrong.
 
Looks like this cloud push is mainly coming from western publishers, so I'll just stop playing new western games. I've got more than enough eastern titles keeping me busy.
 
I would mainly play old games, with a bit of cloud gaming here and there.
However, I refute the basic proposition that mandatory cloud gaming is in the near future.
 
Doubtful it will become mandatory, much less be that large even in 5 years.

It would severely limit my interest in the hobby though, and I'd likely just support smaller devs that still release games that can run on anything while playing older stuff.

The only ones pushing hard for this are AAA publishers and tech companies that can run the infrastructure...and the AAA publishers are making less and less games I even want.
 
Cloud Gaming is supplementary. It can do certain things better than local. Like no downloads, installs, storage management, instance access to games anywhere. It has its place.

If it's more than enough the limitation shouldn't be there in the first place.
Not every service is limited though. Boosteroid, or xCloud don't have limits, neither does PS+ Premium.
 
Look at every purchase based on its own qualities. Don't need overarching rules. If they release a game that looks cool enough to stream, I will stream it. This will hurt the slop merchants most. I'll be less likely to stream an iffy looking game. I went through the same thing switching to Steam. Knowing I couldn't trade stuff in, I pass on the AC Shadows of the world at full price. You guys are about to find out that you can skip all the mid stuff at launch and still not have enough time to play the games you actually want to play.

Every step we take toward streaming, you'll naturally find yourself wasting less money on regretful games.
 
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I don't think I'll get a PS6. I know for sure I'm not getting the next Xbox. I might get the next Nintendo thing, because they still make games I'm interested in, although they're also becoming more and more rare.
I have a massive backlog and there are still thousands of old games I can discover, before I ever play a game in the cloud. I've already been playing mostly older stuff for the last 2 1/2 years and it's been more fun than I had with the 5, 6 years before that, when I noticed that gaming was slowly shifting away from what I value.
 
I've gave the same answer to similar questions about doom and gloom video game industry destruction etc - If they decided to do this right now and/or stop making games all together, id have enough games in my backlog and retro games to last my entire lifetime. So I'll stick with that, I'll just stop playing "new" games and work backwards.
 
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