Also anyone old enough remebers the days of having single servers on the university campus or at work, and everyone had thin terminals that connected to them.
The PC revolution is gone and the Cloud is the revenge of timesharing.
What companies want however is recurring income. Games like the RE series get remade so that they earn money off of previous investments again. Movies are remade, leading to things like the Lion King CGI film selling more than the original cartoon (somehow). And everything is moving to subscriptions and other forms of recurring income.
Another one to remember is that software products like MS Windows and Office and Adobe's products HAD to basically add features or redesign themselves every year, because why else would people buy new versions of the software? I think those companies started to see that, people stopped buying newer versions of their software because the previous versions worked just fine. Microsoft saw that with e.g. Windows XP and Office 97, so many people didn't see the added value - or feared the changes - in the newer versions.
Adobe is a subscription model. Microsoft gave out their OS for free (effectively) or OEM only, in favor of pushing the office365 subscription model. I'm sure the break even point - where the O365 subscription income overtakes that of loose sales of licenses - is somewhere like 2-3 years, especially since there's no retailers in between that take their cut anymore.
And finally, why pay $600 for a new console + game + a subscription for the online services if you can also pay a $15 or whatever a month subscription fee? From a consumer's point of view, the break even point is years, and given there are newer versions of consoles every 5-10 years as well, it does start to make more sense, especially if you don't play games that often.
(disclaimer: I dislike subscriptions and prefer to own games + consoles, just saying I get where they're coming from).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Evil_Village#Sales
I'm not sure how to parse that. The people buying those used games _are_ paying for them; they're just not paying the original publisher. Just like they wouldn't for a used book, or cd, or whatever.
(Of course in practice platform owners are assholes and gamers are dumbasses so it's not even close to efficient.)
Relatedly reselling steam games or windows licenses have quite a few news stories to them.
Seems a bit disingenuous. The RE2 remake was fantastic and significantly different from the original in terms of gameplay. Remaking a game seems very different from remaking a movie. I've got high hopes for RE4's upcoming remake. I can't imagine being excited for a remade movie barring some reason to think it will differ. The lion king is the weirdest remake of them all, being mostly shot for shot but with weird CGI.
After hearing it announced I just kinda rolled my eyes since it's not all that old (maybe because playing it feels like yesterday) and a remake of an existing title. But then, to your point, remembered the re2 remake and thought, "eh they'll probably make re4 worthwhile/even better".
Originally released for the gamecube and then ported to:
PS2, PC, Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, Mobile, PC again, PS4, Xbox One, Switch, VR
You can't blame them for trying. Especially in Google's case, when they have more servers than they know what to do with. Why not offer customers something new? Freedom from expensive hardware purchases, and interesting capabilities like playing on a phone or in a browser.
That said, it's not a deal that interests me. Especially in Stadia's case when they were trying to make you pay full retail price for a game (are they still doing that?), creating an ever-present threat of losing everything when the service shuts down.
Most people pay a lot of money for expensive components (games console or gaming PC) that they get limited utility from because they have other interests besides playing video games all the time - why not switch the model to be using those resources (that cost a lot of money) closer to 100% of the time if it saves money and hassle for everyone involved.
I don't see how fragmentation alters the cost-benefit of only paying for the timeshare of compute resources actually played. Cost saving would be assumed to actually increase due to fragmentation in the space.
For example, if I want to play AAA games on my own hardware my options are (basically):
1). Gaming PC
2). Xbox Series
3). Playstation 5
With streaming the options I can think of (OTTOMH):
1). Google Stadia
2). Microsoft xCloud
3). PlayStation Now
4). Amazon Luna
5). GeForce Now
6). Smaller gaming-pc-in-the-cloud providers (e.g. Shadow)
7). Rent a remote machine and set up Steam/Origin/Epic
8). Whatever Apple gaming-in-the-cloud me-too comes along in the future
I'm not sure it's a market that's struggling for competition.
AWS is making a killing on selling GPU time to startups that should put in the effort of getting their own on-prem compute. The market inefficiency here is that AWS knows that startups don't want to get distracted by system administration and they're squeezing it like hell.
The way they've done this was almost comically silly at first: letting every one of our scores of data scientists provision 32 or 64 node clusters all day, every day, without (initially) any thought or guidance given as to how to control costs. At some point they decided this was too expensive and switched cloud providers, even though the cloud provider wasn't the problem.
Now I have people breathing down my neck every time I need a decent amount of compute for something ... it pains me to think of what kind of on-prem setup they could have stood up for the tens of millions (or more?) they've spent moving to "the cloud".
But also we need to accept that this is also happening because software startups (SaaS or otherwise) are functioning more and more like predators than value providers these days.
At this point, it's not just the aggressive subscription/upselling models, but the various dark patterns in their design, the abusive immediate various newsletter subscriptions, the constant emailing, the popups, the little help widget thing at the bottom right corner of every startup that's there to supposedly help you, the hostile data collection, and many many other insulting and abusive patterns that's more or less a standard now.
And yes, FAANGs do this, but people are comfortable with the abuser they know and already are prey to than the one they don't.
There's nothing wrong with "the cloud", it's all the same tech behind the scenes whether you own it and run it or not, but it's the mercilessly hostile, incredibly ruthless and vicious attitude that these startups display that makes people not want to pay for them.
No, this is what happens when lazy developers prioritize their own convenience over what's best for everyone.
They want to write JS once and have it run everywhere, so we end up with abominations like wasm and node.
People are perfectly willing to pay for games, just look at Steam.
Multiple languages including rust already compile directly to wasm. This would be your own best pro-wasm argument if you're such a js hater.