Steam is larger than any single console now a days, has a DRM which can be trivially bypassed, and still does excellently. The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer. Both were, more or less, true 20 years ago, but haven't been true for many years.

It's never wise to say never, but I think cloud gaming will never go far with gaming. Physics means there's going to be input latency. So it simply won't work for VR where you really need at least 90FPS with no input latency. Of course the year of VR seems to be coming just about after the year of Linux, so maybe that doesn't matter. But even for normal games, the input latency is major. This [1] article shows input latency of more than 1/4th a second on one game ran at 4k. Then there's reduced visuals and of course recent times have also demonstrated beyond any doubt that the whole argument that the cloud won't go down, or won't lose your data, are both marketing fictions.

[1] - https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-how-stadias-input-lag-compares...

This continues to be an absolute no-go for competitive real-time games due to input latency. I honestly think there's a chance that game clients might go the way of the recording industry, and they just might not be worth that much.

As doubtful as I am about the viability of cloud streaming, this IS going to cause a bigger push into live service functionality where maybe you have a light client but the server is authoritative over more and more aspects of the game. Even then, AI can write its own server, so it needs to be full of FOMO if you're not on the official server.

Microsoft just cut their cloud gaming offering significantly (https://kotaku.com/xbox-cloud-gaming-controller-microsoft-as... and https://kotaku.com/game-pass-will-start-capping-the-number-o...) so that's not happening any time soon.

Cloud gaming is nice, I use GeforceNow regularly to play on my mac. However, there are several games that I couldn't complete/play due to the latency (around 60ms). Claire Obscures quicktime events were a pain (plus I used a PS5 controller which adds some latency), also Indiana Jones and the Great Circle had a bossfight mid-game with quicktime events that became so frustrating that I couldn't complete the game - halfway through. Same is true for Battlefield 6 - impossible to play, you just get continuesly fragged from player you didn't even see (remember the netcode does not consider you cloud gaming latency).

Sony will happily shoot themselves in the face rather than give in to their customer's desires.

Microsoft will try and force their customers into something they don't want, because it's obviously better for Microsoft than their customers. They may succeed - success being "not completely losing all of their market share".

Nintendo will figure it out somehow, even if it means pivoting out of gaming altogether. Chances are - they will choose to make their customers happy instead of shooting themselves in the face. But they will try to shoot in the face youtubers and modders who make their customers happy.

On balance, Sony will most likely shoot themselves in the face, and survive to take whatever market share Microsoft gives up. Somehow.

This is unfortunate that it would push them in that direction, but not for the reasons you speak of.

Before the PS4/WiiU era (I'm not including XBox for reasons that will be obvious), they actually tried to create hardware that was "ground breaking" and/or "revolutionary" (to some extent of those words).

The PS3 had the "Cell Processor" and the Wii was loosely based on a PPC architecture.

The PS4 and WiiU were essentially x86 AMD CPU's.

The PS5, Switch 1/2 and every XBox are basically just desktop COTS hardware slightly modified for power consumption to be "consoles".

Are you surprised that 10,000,000 machine hours compressed into a quantized token can "reverse" a very well known and documented architecture?

I'm not.

And that, in my humble opinion, is the unfortunate part.

Feel like eventually ai will get so good people will just autogenerate games just for themselves. Same for movies/shows/etc.

Unfortunately, I don't know if you've tried cloud gaming. It's just not very good now. Also to force people to use it given the current cost climate for components, it would be extremely expensive.

It'll happen regardless, as of now the public internet infrastructure still isn't fast enough to be comparable to local rendering, cloud gaming needs to deliver >50mbps bandwidth at sub 16ms latency.

Have agents play the game 1000s of times and distil the gameplay itself into a new game.

It's already happening, every effort into preservation of what already exists is important

Maybe they'll go streaming-only, but I'd at least wait until the Switch 2 is hacked before making that prediction.

Then they'd have RAM as their own capex cost rather than pushing that on to the consumers.

How would cloud-only prevent this? Do you think LLMs can't exfil the game from the server? They're incredibly persistent and are willing to try many things. Random credentials, vulnerabilities in the game servers / dev machines, or even social engineering the devs/the deployment.

> Unfortunately, this is only going to push Sony/Nintendo/MS more towards cloud gaming. AI enabling these amazing reverse engineering efforts and democratizing access to gaming is amazing

Within 5-10 years, kids will just be asking AI to generate customized games for them on the spot.

Maybe some indie games will even be delivered as prompts too, and the current download/installation times will be replaced by generation times :)

(not saying this is the future I want very much, but it's not unlikely)

Gamers won’t tolerate cloud gaming for long. I remember when QuakeLive was supposed to revolutionize publishing. Cheat free games!

Except the UX is horrid. If studios will certainly try it but there will be massive backlash.

Also a use case for world models to hide the actual source of the game and have it stream a simulation of the real game; never to be exposed or downloaded.

Have you even tried "cloud gaming"? It’s useless for any game that is latency sensitive (fps, moba, …).

I have only had success with single player games.

It's already over. At the very least this will push for more internet connectivity and be good for PC gaming.

Sony's greed has been incredible, let's just accelerate tbh

[dead]

I honestly welcome cloud gaming. Action RPGs might be dead in the water, But there were many games suffering from data mining, and having their secrets revealed day 1. Bringing games to cloud gaming could restore the mystery in games