Greentext

Wirth's Law

Cloud gaming isn't real.

Remote computing almost never makes sense. Budgeting for continued access inevitably costs enough to buy something local - less powerful, but powerful enough. One year university supercomputers could run multiplayer first-person dungeon crawlers. The next year, so could an Apple II. (Christ, $1300 at launch? It did not do much more than the $600 TRS-80 and C64. The Apple I was only $666. Meanwhile a $150 Atari was better at action titles anyway.)

When networks advance faster than computing, there's glimpses of viability. Maybe there was a brief window where machines that struggled with Doom could have streamed Quake over dial-up... at 28.8 kbps... in RealPlayer quality... while paying by the minute for the phone call. Or maybe your first cable modem could have delivered Far Cry in standard-def MPEG2, right between Halo 2 and the $300 launch of the 360, while Half-Life 2 ran on any damn thing.

Nowadays your phone runs Unreal 5 games. What else were you gonna stream games on? If you have a desktop, it's probably for gaming. Set-top boxes keep Ouya-ing themselves, trying to become "mini-consoles" that cost too much, run poorly, and stop getting updates. Minimalist laptops like Chromebook find themselves abandoned, even though the entire fucking pitch was an everlasting dumb terminal for the internet. The only place cloud gaming almost works is for laptops, and really only work laptops, because otherwise-- buy a Steam Deck. You're better off carrying a keyboard for normal desk use than a controller for gaming on the subway.

Unless you're really chasing the big name games, you don't need that high powered of a rig anymore. Stylized graphics are better than highly realistic, they hold up better and longer. The most intensive game I have bought is STALKER 2 and even then my rig is holding up fine.

The first ending has already been happening.

The second ending keeps failing to happen. We've got graveyards full of Cloud Gaming markets. Google Stadia, OnLive, Walmart's cloud service LiquidSky, and various smaller platforms like Vectordash and Bifrost.

The other good ending: People learn to disassemble e-waste and reuse stuff instead of throwing them in the trash. Think of all the SSDs, HDDs, and RAM sticks that are thrown out in old laptops and gaming consoles. It would be great to bring more of a reuse, repair, Maguyver, culture back to electronics.

Secret ending: you keep playing the huge selection of games we already have, endlessly, forgetting games you played a while ago as you restart one you already forgot.

ohh don't worry, once they sort it out on PC, cloud console gaming 2.0 is on it's way.

If those Devs could read low level they'd be very upset

Cloud gaming only happens if people break down and pay for it.

But seeing the usage rates of Gamepass, I'm not encouraged.

When, not if, the AI bubble pops, they will have all these server farms built and will want to push people to cloud gaming to recoup some of their investments

4th ending: The AI bubble bursts,AI companies goes bankrupt and RAM,SSD,Gpu and Consoles plummet to normal prices due to the companies selling their stuff.
5th ending: People move on to used/older PCS and Consoles.
6th Ending: People move on to older/simpler Open source/reverse engineered games that runs on Potato hardware.

There are so many indie games and older PC titles, that it is not really an issue.

I suspect people will just keep their existing equipment running for as long as possible, and secondhand equipment will be worth almost as much as it was when new.

This won't last forever.

3rd ending: Retro gaming makes a massive comeback.

!retrogaming@lemmy.world