I think an enthusiast market would be driven more by quality than ownership. As Steam has shown us the last couple decades, no one gives a rat's butt about ownership outside of weirdos like us.

Just be glad that you don't have the power to turn your predictions into reality.

If you can make the latency 13ms or less, humans won't notice the difference. I think achieving that across continents or even countries is a tall order, but if you got a good distribution network where most gamers can access content close to them, I think it would be achievable in the not so distant future.

So once you eliminate the noticeable lag and ownership is not part of the equation, the only differentiator is the added convenience of not having to install anything on your computer and not having to purchase games individually (which is more expensive and also is less convenient... a flat automatic recurring fee is less hassle).

If I take what Steam is doing and apply it to movies, Steam is like that bulky piece of software I need to install on my computer to watch movies. It requires me to buy individual movies I don't own and install the movies locally (and then I need to manage that). I also need to manage all those per unit purchases and it is more expensive.

Why wouldn't I just go with Netflix and watch a movie directly in my chrome browser (which I already have on my machine anyways) with no need to manage anything? Before watching a movie, I don't need to install anything, I don't need to purchase anything and once I'm done with the movie, I don't need to uninstall it from my disk or anything.

To me, assuming that you take ownership out of the picture completely and look at everything else, that's better quality.

The problem with the vision of streaming taking over the video gaming world based on Netflix is that you only have to look at Netflix to see that barely 5% of movies / TV shows are on there, and half of what is regularly gets "cycled" off. "Sorry you can't play your game. You picked the wrong 24 out of 48 months to play it and we removed it and replaced it with something else. Oh and we only bother to stream 1 in every 20 new titles anyway, and don't bother with old stuff, so if you like a wide choice in content get lost" is no serious 'replacement' at all to the current model.

I also think people simply do not understand how different the back-end systems are. Netflix, Spotify, etc, have fixed static reusable content that can be "multicast", etc. Movies, music, etc, are pre-compressed once, then fed into a fancy routers that can cast the same packets simultaneously to thousands of different people (eg, if 10m people were watching a 120 minute movie simultaneously and devices can cache 1 min of content in advance, statistically you've got 83,333 people sharing the same 1 minute (of total 120 minutes) chunk of content from cached servers. The content is then inexpensively reused hour after hour, day after day.

Game streaming on the other hand, has to be done in real-time and is both unique per user and content is non-reusable, ie, using above comparison those 10m users actually need 10m separate individual GPU rendering + encoder paths. The costs are far higher so expect 1. Loss leader pricing (they'll keep it cheap to start with but then massively stuff up prices when it gets popular to the extent it may actually be more expensive than buying them in sales), 2. Only a small slice of only the most profitable / popular of games will be streamed, and 3. Expect the same market fragmentation that affects video streaming enough (Netflix themselves are starting to lose more subscribers than they are adding mostly due to "Subscription Fatigue").

ie, anyone thinking the future of gaming will be some utopia of "Netplay" entity streaming 50,000 PC games to tens of millions of people for £10pm needs a reality check. It may start out cheap but will also end up more like a few hundred titles per platform, and you'll pay £30pm to Xboxplay. And another £30pm to EAplay. And another £30pm to Ubiplay. And another £30pm to Squeenixplay. And another £30pm to Epicplay. And another £30pm to..., etc, with platform exclusivity going into overdrive pushing for that 'captive audience'. For millions of gamers it simply isn't going to end up cheaper at all, which is exactly why some in the industry are pushing for it (if it meant gamers spending less money than now, they obviously wouldn't want it at all...)

I dont think it will work the same way like for movies and music. Streaming will always be an optional thing but sure i see people which arent serious about gaming attracted to it. But the question is still if streaming has a future.Enough pc gaming and ethusiast will always exist which care about onwesgip and options
Man people care about that. Steam drm is very light. Steam people arent attracted to a rent like service. Pc gaming will always be there im not worried differnt strokes fore different folks. Compared to mobile pc and console gaming is niche but pc gaming will raise in that amount of time and we will see a lot of improvements as well. But streaming games can fail as well because it removes a lot of options. Whats the point streaming on the go? It takes away the whole point of a portable device
There is no vision with taking over. Streaming co exists with local hardware its not meant as a replacement. I know for sure this rental thing will never appeal to me and millions of others like it does for movies and i simply dont care as much for movies like i do for games. A rental service for music is also totally pointless. So pc gaming will be on the raise and plenty of other options will exist like now. Mobile gaming will still be the leader of everything

There is going be the same problem as movie/show streaming.
If they ever reach 13 ms or whatever number (the question of why the hell should there be ping in a single player game still stands), it's probably going to be stuck at 1080p or if not, it's going to be brutally compressed. So you will have a very limited image quality, probably stuck at 60 FPS to save the cloud computational power (or will have to pay extra for) and the need of a very fast internet connection (which is still far from omni-present).

And guess what the delay on a 60 FPS game is? 16.67 ms. You are already over the arbitrary 13 ms limit. Anything else is extra on top of that. And it's going to take a long time before streaming of any kind moves to higher resolution/FPS numbers and it's still going to be lagging behind massively. Just look at the quality of a movie on a Blu-Ray vs a streamed one.

So by the time game streaming reaches that point, having a dedicated gaming system will probably easily be able to handle 4/8k at 144/240 Hz. And high FPS is much more important in games than in movies because there are inputs. Say what you want, but I still noticed an improvement in my play when upgrading from 165 to 240 Hz in a game like UT 2004/UT 3.

People which don’t care about ownership are weirdos. Most people on steam don’t even know what drm is but they know that steam is the lesser evil than rental services. I talked to a lot of people on steam and explained the difference between gog and steam and they are now a part of the gog army as well. But you can use goldberg on most steam games where you can play games without the launcher to preserve them.
Exactly Microsoft already explained that selling games will always be a core business model. I mean they have a rental service and on top they can sell you ultra deluxe edition lmao why should they screw that. People are always scared of something new but everything will stay the same the only thing what will change will be the triple s* industry but at it time a full blown indie gamer

1. Exclusives don't get cycled off, and drive the market.

2. People have obviously shown they don't care about the detriments you listed here and below, based on their embrace of the format and it's quick rise to dominance over all other forms of movie, television and music access. Gamepass is already showing the same will happen with games, whether they stream or download.

Maybe my head is in the clouds, but we'll see.

It's true that I stream 1080 movies, not 4k ones. Honestly, I think we've hit the point of no returns, especially on a regular screen (ie, 50-65 inches nowadays) in a regular living room.

I think 1080 to 4k may make a difference for SOME (but not all) setups, but unless you got a mansion with a movie theater sized screen (ie, you're in the 1%), you won't get anything from going from 4k to 8k.

Worst comes to worst, they may implement a temporary caching layer of some assets with a locally implemented final rendering engine (similar to what browsers do with regular internet pages) to speed things up so that they have less to transmit over the network.

Also, while I don't foresee huge improvements in latency, bandwidth will probably keep getting better for another decade at least.

My personal point of view on this is that rental services (in contrast to Steam) are actually honest with you about what your ownership status with the content you are paying for is and, unlike Steam, actually offer some kind of added value to offset the fact that you don't own the content (ie, you don't have to install anything and you pay a modest monthly fee to access a very large collection of content).

The base model of Steam is great for publishers (you monetise the content piecemeal per unit and still retain control over it), it sucks for end users. They just wrapped a shitty core in one of the most refined package (great client, stable services) seen in the industry (and a lot of momentum in terms of content), but the core of it is still sh*t.

To be clear on my point of view, drm-free > Netflix > Steam.

The moment I can't get the former, I'm going to Netflix, not Steam. I'm not a sucker, I want to get more value for my money.

I've no idea why streaming services are held to some mile high benchmark because of the "format". Me opening Netflix : "I think I'll watch a classic tonight. Maybe Die Hard?" 'Unavailable'. OK, then The Matrix? 'Unavailable'. Dune, that's fairly recent? 'Unavailable'. No Time To Die? Casablanca? The French Connection? Raiders Of The Lost Ark? Lethal Weapon? The Big Lebowski? Saving Private Ryan? 'Unavailable', 'Unavailable', 'Unavailable', 'Unavailable', 'Unavailable', 'Unavailable', 'Unavailable'. Also Me: "Good job I didn't get rid of that DVD/BR collection then..."

Video games will be no different in 20 years time. Some will be streamed, but people who have a wide taste will quickly get bored with such tiny catalogues. Many games will continue to be sold to end users for the simple reason streaming services aren't interested in streaming them anyway as the "subscription pie" can be thinly sliced only so far.

I'm not sure why you guys keep replying with "my specific tastes won't be catered to so it won't work." You are not the market, you're probably not even mainstream. The vast, vast majority of people have shown they want subscriptions, and if they really want something in particular not on any of their subscription services they'll rent (or pirate) it.

WE are very different. WE shop on GOG for a reason. WE get annoyed at news articles that act like Steam is PC gaming entirely, or which promote this months Gamepass additions or whatever. But WE, my friend, are not the market as a whole.

Which isn't a doom sentence, smaller markets can still make money. Movies still mostly come out on disc, for example, though modern TV shows much less so. Subscription exclusives will start happening though, it's only a matter of time.

Forza 5 is already.

Since I don't have enough knowledge or motivation to make a plausible technical scenario, here is is an answer in the old mystical sense.

It shall be similar in many ways.
It shall be different in many ways.

Also, see the scene in Dragon Age Origins where the player character and Jowan encounter a spirit trapped in a statue.(mage origin story)

Well gamepass shows exactly nothing. Majority of xbox users are using it. The player number is by far not profitable. Selling games will always be the driving force which was said by Phil spencer. He also said that gamepass could fail in the long run. Nothing is in danger just because something new is joining the market. Pc players aren’t into that rental stuff at least far majority and never will. And the once which do use it as a side thing to try out games. Well companies will always prefer selling you ultra deluxe editions. Every option will exist because more options more money. In my opinion with games it wont work like with movies in the long run.
The fast majority of people don’t use subscriptions you are talking nonsense and make things up