Last year during the E3 press conference, Microsoft tried to "modernize" the whole living room gaming paradigm. They mentioned things like - 1. Having a whole slew of servers to cloud compute 2. Buying and sharing games via online distribution 3. Always on connectivity to the cloud
Gamers hated this idea (as you can see with the sales of the One vs the PS4).
The issue is,and I can't blame them, that we still do not have the infrastructure to do this yet. Yes, me and you may have a good enough internet line to pull this off, but even now our internet access, latency, connectivity, and security is a joke. Remember, a lot of these guys do play online but have issues with latency by playing just a multiplayer game. We need this fixed first before a company goes all in. It may take for the next cycle (or two or three) for dedicated game machines to fully embrace this.
I'm excited for the game Crackdown 3. Their online play will feature fully rendered buildings which stands on their own dedicated server. I think this is awesome and is a step in the right direction. Can you imagine if every NPC can have its own server controlling it? Crazy-power. It will take time though.
And I'm all for it. Take the time to do things right and we'll get a much better product than just a gimmick.