No it couldn't. Its fundamentally inferior to local hardware and no amount of wishful thinking will change the laws of physics.
Honest question, which of those is in any way applicable to this technology? Besides the fact that these services already exist and, provided you have decent infrastructure, which will only become more accessible as time goes on, do serve most people's gaming needs even in this early state.
Of course, there will always be some for whom local will be the preferred option, but they were talking about the future default. There are still people buying and consuming Blu-ray due to its higher quality, but the default (i.e. what the majority use) has become streaming, and I don't see anything preventing gaming going the same way. If you wanna stick with gaming, the majority tend to play on consoles and do view the advantages in convinience to outweigh the disadvantages in terms of possible fidelity, higher framerates and lower latency that a PC may offer (even in cases of similar pricing).
Concerning cloud gaming, network latency will go down, and the offered bandwidth will go up in most areas of the globe. With recent advancements in high quality upscaling, networking demands will also decrease. Physics is not a hindrance, unless I am overlooking something.
No, the majority never even noticed. The irreducible latency some are talking about is imperceptible, not a factor for the vast majority of the populus. Ease of use, lack of install times, flexibility, and ability to spread out cost, all will outweigh that.
Speed of a signal travelling through optical fiber or copper cable? Additional latency of cloud gaming rules out genres that require twitch reactions (e.g. competitive FPS, fighting games, platformers).
fwiw I like owning my own hardware, but pretending that cloud gaming isn't going to happen because of the single-digit percentage of gamers that absolutely need locality for competition purposes is just ignoring market dynamics -- there's a huge amount of money to be made in cloud gaming and that's really the only thing that matters.
[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/393646/tested-how-nvidia-ref...
Like, I work in video games for a large publisher - we have done a lot of testing on this technology, both on GeForce Now and our own internal solutions. Without getting into details I probably shouldn't talk about - the lowest latency you can see when streaming is around 150-200ms, and that's in absolutely perfect conditions where you have a data centre super close to you. Unfortunately, 150ms is visible to your average player, and in our testing the enjoyment of the game is directly related to what kind of game it is - strategy games, action games, even driving games? Mostly fine, not really noticable. First person shooters? Extremely noticable, in our testing there is a noticable drop of player performance in online PvP when streaming. We have been experimenting with improving it(by giving the player just a touch of auto-aim assist when they are streaming), and we were able to bring the numbers back up to where they were for non-streaming players. But then you get into a debate about whether that is fair or not.
Either way, like OP said - you can't beat physics.
https://youtu.be/XXvKlpkJjFU?si=nSMT8m5onkuqggwo&t=247
Nvidia is advertising 25 ms on the 240Hz tier, even if it's best case it should scale linearly with ping:
Developers will adapt their games and how they play to suit the medium based on the mediums popularity.
Civilization, SimCity, zoo tycoon, Paradox Grand strategy games, etc... Would all be fine to play on a streaming platform
So yeah, if it's shittier and allows even harder rent seeking, it'll be the standard in a few decades. Don't count on quality being a factor, gamers are the kings of Stockholm Syndrome and there isn't any hoop you can't get them to buy and then jump through.
That's an extremely weird argument. Literally no one at Bethesda was being stopped from writing compelling dialogue choices for that game because controllers only have 4 buttons - it's a choice they made conciously, they wanted to simplify the dialogue trees and that's what they ended up with. To even suggest that it's because of consoles is........just odd man. Like, it's not a thing. I've worked in video games for long enough to tell you that the number of controller buttons would never even make it into a discussion about these things, unless it was coming directly from Todd Howard or something.
