The writing is on the wall for me. A cheap streaming device + a modest games subscription will open the platform up to many who are currently held back by the cost of the console.
- You have to buy all the games all over again
- people, that are familiar with google ways, didn't want to invest anything into stadia
- stadia controller, while nice, didn't want with anything, but stadia until recently (still doesn't work with ATV for some reason)
- Google own devices didn't support Stadia for absolutely no reason (you could have side-loaded the app, and it worked just fine)
xCloud always felt much better than Stadia when playing.
The bad part is needing to live close to a big, expensive, GPU-heavy data-center, but if mobile GPU's are getting that good, maybe in the near future we could have single servers or small racks serving a few dozen to a few hundred players, that would be much easier to co-locate, grow as needed, and improve latency.
If car makers gave up with EVs 30 years ago, and never tried improving, where would we be today? Because EVs are not the ICE replacement today, does that mean it won't be in 30 years' time?
All I'm saying is that the natural outcome for gaming is cloud + subscription. Maybe not the next xbox console, but possibly the one after next.
This was the inevitable outcome of music and video. Gaming is next.
We are going to own nothing and we will love it.
That's collective action though. No one wants to do that.
The biggest issues is probably long load times. A suspend state to drive function would be a big boost.
Then it’s probably the oversold capacity.
Then it would be only 80% compatibility with all titles.