I remember the CEO of NVIDIA making similar claims like 10-15 years ago (and being rather eager for that future to come), but I’m not really seeing anything that has changed since then that makes it more likely now.
There’s the increases in hardware costs, yes, but in order to get sufficiently low latency, you can’t just plop one or a few big data centers per country, you need at least one smaller one pretty much per town. And to ensure a good quality of service, those are going to need more redundant hardware than a more centralised solution would, and given that cloud gaming service providers are also affected by hardware getting more expensive, that would make for some very high up-front costs.
There’s the possibility of VCs throwing dumb money at these companies until they control the market, but for that to work, they need to actually be able to take control of the market. But they’re not just competing against the latest and greatest, they’re also competing against ten year old hardware that’s considerably more affordable. Things aren’t advancing as quickly as they used to, and I doubt the shrinking number of people who do always want the best possible are going to be too thrilled about having graphics littered with compression artifacts.
I remember the CEO of NVIDIA making similar claims like 10-15 years ago (and being rather eager for that future to come), but I’m not really seeing anything that has changed since then that makes it more likely now.
There’s the increases in hardware costs, yes, but in order to get sufficiently low latency, you can’t just plop one or a few big data centers per country, you need at least one smaller one pretty much per town. And to ensure a good quality of service, those are going to need more redundant hardware than a more centralised solution would, and given that cloud gaming service providers are also affected by hardware getting more expensive, that would make for some very high up-front costs.
There’s the possibility of VCs throwing dumb money at these companies until they control the market, but for that to work, they need to actually be able to take control of the market. But they’re not just competing against the latest and greatest, they’re also competing against ten year old hardware that’s considerably more affordable. Things aren’t advancing as quickly as they used to, and I doubt the shrinking number of people who do always want the best possible are going to be too thrilled about having graphics littered with compression artifacts.