Hacker News Reader

Comment by modwilliam | Hacker News Reader

Cloud gaming probably isn't targeted to people like you, then. When the choice is between not being able to play the game at all (due to lacking sufficient hardware) and cloud gaming, the potential downsides of cloud gaming are worth it.

View on HN

You're right, it's not for people like him. It's not for people that have been around the block and have learned a thing or two. They're hoping to take advantage of the young and naive.

What I meant by "people like tetha" is people who can't play games on their own hardware, don't want to buy their own gaming hardware, and/or don't care about these rights.

I know what you meant and I think you're whitewashing the intentions of these corporations. They aren't motivated by good will, but rather by greed. They want to seize more control from consumers and they are going to normalize this first with the youngest consumers who don't know any better. Once these systems have proven technically feasible and consumers become compliant, the option to download the software and run it yourself on your own hardware will be taken away. Before you know it, there will exist games that only exist in "cloud" form.

How is it only for young and naive? If they don’t stop selling physical versions with the arrival of video game streaming (just like they didn’t stop selling boxed versions of movies), I will just stream a lot of stuff first and then buy boxed versions of the games i end up liking a lot. Just like I already do with movies, music vinyls, and digital versions of video games.

> "If they don’t stop selling physical versions with the arrival of video game streaming (just like they didn’t stop selling boxed versions of movies)"

They will once it becomes normalized. DRM for software has long been far more odious than seen in the movie industry.

Oh, they will stop selling physical versions if it gets successful enough.

Some people don't care about hoarding game discs or cartridge. I have drawers full of Nintendo Cartdrige, playstation 1, 2 and 3 discs, a few older xbox games, that I can't play anymore because the required console died, or they are back in my childhood home where I grew up. To be honest, I don't even want to play any of those games anymore, but if for some nostalgia infused reason I wanted to, I'd much rather they just be automatically available to stream on my TV or my laptop than having to spend hours tracking down all the required hardware for me to play a game that I'll most likely get bored with within an hour or two.

The same thing happened with movies, with some people wanting to hoard boxes and boxes of dvd, vhs or blurays, thinking that they are somewhat smarter than people who just pay some subscription (or digital rental) to stream whatever movies they want to watch when they want it, on the device they want to watch it on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com