The alternative is paying for hardware, so that point is irrelevant. It’s essentially a hardware rental service.
If you play an hour a day every day, that’s only $146 a year.
I’m lucky if I get to play 2 hours a week, with that comparison this is technically a better value than my gaming PC or Steam Deck.
Obviously there’s a lot those devices can do that cloud streaming can’t, but this ultimately makes gaming far more accessible. Got a friend you want to play games with but can’t convince them to spend $600+ on hardware? This is a much better value proposition that gets their foot in the door.
Still, I don’t like the implications for a possible future where hardware is outrageously priced and largely inaccessible.
Yeah the real problem is what we give up by allowing this to happen. Modding, source ports, preservation, speedrun auto splitters. Perhaps even video capture and gameplay videos could be restricted with a new version of HDCP. They could also pretty easily shutdown unlicensed tournaments by just detecting a bunch of users coming from the same convention center IP address.
The alternative is paying for hardware, so that point is irrelevant. It’s essentially a hardware rental service. If you play an hour a day every day, that’s only $146 a year. I’m lucky if I get to play 2 hours a week, with that comparison this is technically a better value than my gaming PC or Steam Deck.
Obviously there’s a lot those devices can do that cloud streaming can’t, but this ultimately makes gaming far more accessible. Got a friend you want to play games with but can’t convince them to spend $600+ on hardware? This is a much better value proposition that gets their foot in the door.
Still, I don’t like the implications for a possible future where hardware is outrageously priced and largely inaccessible.
Yeah the real problem is what we give up by allowing this to happen. Modding, source ports, preservation, speedrun auto splitters. Perhaps even video capture and gameplay videos could be restricted with a new version of HDCP. They could also pretty easily shutdown unlicensed tournaments by just detecting a bunch of users coming from the same convention center IP address.