The future is this, with light fast connection for streaming... Not the next 10 years but someday...

I think that the implications of this could far morse than DRM.
With game streaming you wouldn't need a relatively powerful PC/console, which is a good thing per se, but as a downside: which ones are the devices widely available that everyone?
TVs and smartphones.
This woud imply a radical shift in what games are and whom games are made for.
Games more casual than ever (people would play on the metro on their way to work or during the lunch break or whatever) adn even more couch gaming.

aren't what you are saying here good things? I don't understand whats bad about it...

People act like the continuing popularization of video gaming is bad.

In fact, we have more good games now than we ever did before.

Yes there are the classics of old that will never be replaced (King of Dragon Pass). Yes, there are great old games that have been followed up by abysmal sequels (Morrowind, according to a lot of people).

But!...

Grim Dawn
Sunless Sea
Civilization IV
Into the Breach
Darkest Dungeon
The Witcher 3
Braid
XCOM (or if you prefer Xenonauts)
Ori and the Blind Forest
Hollow Knight
Torchlight 2 (and HOB for that matter)
Fallout New Vegas
Papers Please
FTL
Hotline Miami
Super Meat Boy (I prefer Mr. Bree+)
Cuphead
Owlboy

...and I'm just scratching the surface.

Can't you see that as video games get more popular and more profitable, the niche smart difficult artistic games that you love also get created in greater numbers? Gaming on phones, console gaming, streaming, MMOs, Fortnight... ALL OF IT IS GOOD FOR THE GAMING YOU LOVE!

Sheesh, people.

That's highly debatable. There's always been many good games. In fact, before the last two decades or so, most games had some quality to them.

Nowadays 99% of AAA games are complete and utter garbage. Even if we did have more good games than ever before (which we probably don't), we also have far more terrible games than ever before. Far more modern day games are bad than good.

I think a couple of people got confused about game streaming as in Twitch, vs what this topic is talking about.

To clarify, this topic is about services that allow you to play a game only by streaming it from a provider server and never downloading it or installing it on your computer. This could also be called "cloud gaming".

There were several services that attempted this in the past. All of them failed both because of bandwidth concerns (at the time) and because people didn't like the model.

If publishers went this way, I don't think that those who are used to gaming in the current paradigm would go for it. However, a younger generation that is used to EVERYTHING on-demand and having physical possession of NOTHING might. However, that would also mean that the company hosting the games to stream must have MASSIVE computing power, especially for 3D intensive games or eventual VR game streams.

I don't think it is doable in practice at this point.

I'm okay with game streaming.

Keep in mind, it still needs to run from my own hardware. So say a NVidia Shield, playing Skyrim on a handheld device while i'm on the pot or something, letting my more powerful hardware do the work and using my network to display it within 100 feet of it.

I'm totally against not being able to own your game, having required internet connection to play or subscription to someone in order to access what i could play locally.

Thats how this is going to go. Microsoft are already focusing on streaming games rather than consoles. And they already have made it clear they want to take Windows that way as well.

https://www.geekwire.com/2019/beyond-console-xbox-leaders-detail-microsofts-gaming-future-led-xcloud-streaming-service/amp/

Microsoft's aim is to make it so that you buy a game and rather than having a Xbox or downloading it you just stream it to whatever device its supported on. If it takes off then others will most likely follow suit.

I don't like this, and feel it will alienate alot of people as still in 2019 we have areas in the UK where the net is not solid, slow speeds and people on caps. Also what if your net goes down, your then straight away locked out of everything? And what if your account gets hacked or something, you've then lost everything you've ever brought.

Once things like latency and connectivity are trivial enough to where there is no real difference in playing the game (esp. for multiplayer) then I think you'll see it become more popular. Remember, everyone laughed at Netflix when it first got started and now here we are.

A major reason i refuse to touch 10 (not to mention it's obnoxious).

There will always be latency. I don't see the point. The infrastructure to set it up is far more fragile and large vs local hardware.

I hear you. If 7 was still going to be supported i'd jump back to that. And I hate Linux so have to use 10 sadly.

'Supported', heh... that mostly means for patches/updates which i never relied on in the first place. Never trusted them. And with their big push to Win 10 and malware approaches to get you to download it, i was glad i turned that feature off years ago.

A huge portion of software will continue to work, and even drivers will come out. 7 is the last version of windows i'll ever use. I already got Linux Mint on my laptop whose hard drive died once. Working nicely for what i need.

I know. Whilst i'm not so much fussed about Mcirosoft Updates as they are not needed most times. The biggest issue for me is anti-virus for 7, as Avast just hogs alot and Defender on 10 works fine. If MS just released Defender on 7 then i'd be fine. (And Defender is not the same as MSE.)

Huh?

I haven't used an Antivirus in years. I am specific about what games/sites/software i install/use. And... haven't had issues for years. Actually my EX got ransomeware no her computer which i manually removed. (lost desktop icons, but otherwise it was fine).