It seems it may be a North American thing. We have them here in Canada as well.

I'm sure limits are common around the globe, but so far I always get baffled whenever it's mentioned.

this opens up all kinds of delightful possibilities

FROM THEIR END

and shitty ones for us woohoo!

the machines will replace us. isn't it likely? I wonder. do some savvier types think, the trick is to become one of the better machines. keep ahead of them. that sort of it.

cause otherwise what is the endgame behind constantly shifting more control away from the individual? you think, well, they'll always want pretty folks around. but, eventually the machines will handle that too. you can get yourself a model bot in whatever fancy you like. there is no reason for anyone to have any control or respect. you don't even need people around. for anything. so much emphasis on machines the machines have to eventually start going into business for themselves. so maybe that's what they think.

no need to pay a retailer. no need to pay shippers. no need to do any R&D on making the thing durable for home use. no need for any expensive and irritating consumer testing organizations and complying with governmental regulations for consumer product liabilities. no need for marketers... actually. you'll still need all the marketers and lawyers for the stream doohickey. just less science and other doer guys. still the marketers and lawyers for it though.

and of course my EA box won't work games from FrozenByte or SuperGiant of course. actually it would cause those guys'd sign right up because what else would they do?

I cannot wait for EA's little box to sit in my room. don't you just want the game industry guys doing what the telecoms and hollywood guys have been doing? it's just so, so, appealing.

stream you guitar! hah! one day maybe if it gets cheap enough they'll make a guitar that sounds as good as a Martin. any Martin. but the trick is it's not a guitar just something you play like one and the sound is streamed from a DSP somewhere. better than the real thing. that'd be lame though. just have to find a marketer to make it not. then you buy your $500 or $1000(why not?) E-Tar and sign up for the $30 or $90 (why not?) monthly and you don't need the Martin. and this is better. think of the trees!

Nope, a lot of countries have data caps.

I have 200GB, and as if that isn't bad enough, I have to use 100GB during "off peak", which means I have to be semi-nocturnal.

Go over the cap, and it's throttled to a pathetic 256 Kbps, which means some sites time out.

oh ho ho! ambitious! yes! stream doohickey! you fucking douchenozzle! no! you force the monitor guy to license your chip! you sic the fucking lawyers on the guys who make stuff if they try to make anything that does what ___serivice___ we provide. the marketers will make it palatable.

what? you think we want to actually mail a fucking tiny little box to people? I suppose you also think that we'll be order the chips? we are right now but that's not the plan. the plan is to have the guys who making the stuff just license our stuff to go on their chips. they order the chips from the chip guys and put it in their TV and they license a term with us for the chip to function. and you sic the lawyers on em if they make their own chip.

The EA future is just so appealing.

some posts delivered good reasons against that streaming model. so i guess we won't see this future too soon.

Wow, I have to say that I'm a bit surprised by this being considered viable. Even with the best Internet connectivity, the input latency of going over the Internet, then waiting for video to be encoded and sent back would totally kill a large number of game experiences. Some games have too much input latency on native hardware as it is. I can't imagine that gamers will find this an acceptable way to play most games. Maybe online Scrabble or Monopoly type games that are turn based and not realtime interactive if people are suckers to fall prey to this model.

I agree with you on the hardware cost side of things too, however lets be realistic. If a consumer would remotely even consider games delivered like this then they probably don't have high end PCs or care about resolution, frame rates and other technical aspects, as none of that would reliably happen with heavily compressed video streaming online in any acceptable fashion on today's Internet.

I pretty much agree with what you've said though, there may be some low end non-interactive games where they could do this and a niche of people to eat it up. I can't see it remotely succeeding with the mainstream now or ever though.

I for one can categorically say that I will never in a million years ever pay to buy or rent a game that is delivered to me over streaming while running on some cloud server. It just wont happen. Even if every game being made moved to this model I would not embrace it. I would stop playing video games completely before even remotely considering paying for this. In fact, even if someone volunteered to pay for it FOR me, I would turn it down with a big "no thanks!"

Ultimately I see it all purely as a new form of DRM and an attempt to gain and hold power and control over consumers, and put a PR spin on it being great for consumers because <insert pure bullshit here>. It wont fly. Gamers collectively aren't stupid.

I wasn't meaning to imply it was just North America that had caps. I probably should have said it's a North America-wide issue and not isolated to the US.

You Aussies seem to get screwed over at practically every turn when it comes to internet and games.

While I find consoles largely pointless and would love to see Nintendo porting their games over to PC...

I just see this as one of those "From our cold dead hands" sort of situations.

Its called congestion. And yes it does exist in various parts of the world especially for those on adsl (many of us) -- regular backhaul issues exist with all our ISPs here on various exchanges. And those on cable??? ask those here who are on Optus and when there are a lot of heavy users in the neighbourhood....

i have my doubts about this being right.
you were able to resist console exclusives?

I can. Predict. The. Future.

:waves wand:

By the power of greyskull!

Turns out that a 200-300 USD barrier of entry is a quite effective repellant.

That sounds awful to me but also I guess this guy is not completely wrong. With all that cloud computing technology on the rise, we will see much of this one way or the other.

The whole game logic will probably be server-based. The graphics effects ... not sure if currently it would be better to stream them (too much latency) or to generate them on the client side. So at least half the game might still be present locally.