Options are great, but generally speaking companies tend to sunset options that are less profitable, regardless if it provides a better experience.

Case in point, once movie and TV streaming got popular, selling that content in physical or even digital form died off but it didn’t die completely. Plenty of people still like to own the media they pay for, plenty of people still like physical media collections that can never, ever be taken away when a server gets shut down. Having that option is great, too.

But it’s a less profitable option. So, to spite what some want, certain content is just streaming only now, while the prices rise. And that’s the new world we allowed ourselves to be shepherded into. While we were blinded by convenience, they discreetly shut the door behind us, and now there’s no going back (without piracy).

So yes, game streaming itself is a great option to have for many. That’s not the problem.

The trajectory is the problem.

It’s also worth pointing out any direction that furthers our dependence on the ISPs not being awful is asking for trouble. For example, remember when Charter was allowed to acquire Time Warner Cable and become Spectrum? They promised regulators they would not impose bandwidth caps for 7 years, and as of today it’s been 7 years and 30, days.

10 years from now, at an Applzonooglsoft Developers Conference: the new cloud… is YOU!

crowd gasps and then immediately is turned into fluffy little floating data center server racks

You: I FORETOLD THIS DAY!

Going from dumb terminals to beefy individual networked computers and back a few times was a thing for a while and eventually it has settled into a use case specific balance because it is a balance between costs of centralizing the computing, networking, and people managing both. Throw networking connection issues for many locations and it is clear that everything cloud doesn’t work for everything.

Centralized gaming has already shown the same complexities and can never be fully put into the cloud even if that will work for a large portion of games and uses.

And they told in communism you will not have anything

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Phil Spencer confirmed it’s not making money in the FTC leaks. That’s why in MS’s financials they don’t disclose gamepass financials.

It actually staggers me how widespread the belief that MS won’t up prices is. I wonder if they thought the same about Netflix or cable TV subscriptions? Lol

And yeah, also in the FTC leaks MS stated they’d love to do a hostile takeover of Nintendo or Valve if they got the choice. I don’t know why people think Microsoft are on their side. They’re a 2.5 trillion dollar company with a history of anti-competitive behaviour lol

You don’t think MS will up prices? Lol

Phil Spencer in the MS FTC leaks literally said that Gamepass isn’t making money. Now, personally, I’m of the belief that MS is a for-profit company rather than a charity, in which case they’ll up prices.

They have to up prices or shut down gamepass. That’s not my opinion, that’s capitalism. Microsoft will not keep gamepass if there’s no possibility of making money from it, and there isn’t at current pricing (source: Microsoft).

And save thousands? Thousands? You’d seriously be buying more than 33 AAA games each year for full retail price? Then never playing them again? Sounds like you’re exaggerating by a pretty large amount lol

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I don’t think that necessarily has to be true.

Even so, MS is already dabbling with buying publishers and wielding them as a weapon through enforcing exclusivity. See buying Bethesda and destroying development of the PS5 port for Starfield. I think it’s naive to think this will get better and not worse.

Who says they’ll have to?

I’m very skeptical that you’re describing the majority, let alone vast.

That “only worth playing once” thing only applies to story heavy, fixed map, pure single-player games, which are mainly a sub-set of AAA games, typically on consoles.

(Or multiplayer games when somebody only plays those games were their friends are, so the game stops being fun if most of their friends aren’t there anymore, so naturally such people never get back to those)

Further, even amongst that kind of game, some are so good that they’re fun again to play after some time (though it usually takes a couple of years to forget enough of the details for it to be fun again). For example, Fallout 3.

Methinks you’re a very young gamer, who is mainly fad driven hence buys the same AAA games as his friends and doesn’t buy indie games (which is where you’ll find the most replayable games of all, as indies often have generated maps since they can’t afford to spend millions of dollars on people doing level design) so yeah, all you’ve ever seen is games that are only fun once or for a very limited time period.

Youthfullness would also explain why you confuse your own behaviour with “the vast majority of the gaming community”. (Which is extra funny because the average age of gamers nowadays is somewhere in the mid 30s).

I would be seriously surprised if you were an older gamer as they’re more likely to buy games for their fun factor - not fashionability amongst peers or last gen graphics - hence sooner or later end up playing some indie game or other with generated maps, plus are much more likely to have picked up again some game they played and finished years ago and still fondly remember, just to discover it’s actually fun again.

Lol… You poor kid.

its been like that for a good while now, I remember when I first tried geforce now playing cod 2019, then at work I wanted to setup my classes during lunch and it was gone, turned out blizzard/activision got mad that nvidia was letting people play their game even though you had to own the game so they pulled it off the service

Guess the cost tradeoff depends on how much you play and how updated you keep your PC. My PC can’t play Cyberpunk at 4k 120fps. You must have good Internet though.

Owning a computer, especially if a desktop, makes more sense, in my understanding.

In my country, a gaming laptop is about €2500, while a decent gaming desktop starting on the €800.

Even when factoring in the energy, unless running a 1KW+ machine, 7 days a week, non stop, it still makes sense. You have your data in your machine, in your home.

I have personally done the math for myself, and it is ultimately cheaper to subscribe to the middle tier of GFN. That was before any price hikes though, I am yet to pay or calculate the new prices, not sure when they start, but I am fairly sure it’s still cheaper at least here where I live.

In addition, it relieves a lot of stress and time spent on buying, fetching, installing and changing the thermal pastes and keeping it clean etc, as well as doesn’t contribute to the already barely tolerable heat in the summer, which high-end GPUs tend to do under stress.

All around it’s much more convenient for me, since I only need those high-end specs for gaming, and have a good light laptop setup for work and other uses.

But YMMV, of course.

Edit: We do have very affordable and fast internet here though, so that’s probably a thing not available everywhere, which would make this much less convenient. In my country, it’s not a concern even traveling.

Pretty much everyone I know refuses to buy into anything Google releases now. Not because they are tired of losing money or support, but they hate having to try and move their stuff over to a different service.

The average user won’t care about firmware updates or that they lost a few bucks, but they hate when they need to figure out how to move their music over to Spotify or lose the ability to cloud print.