[Topfi]

> laws of physics

Honest question, which of those is in any way applicable to this technology? Besides the fact that these services already exist and, provided you have decent infrastructure, which will only become more accessible as time goes on, do serve most people's gaming needs even in this early state.

Of course, there will always be some for whom local will be the preferred option, but they were talking about the future default. There are still people buying and consuming Blu-ray due to its higher quality, but the default (i.e. what the majority use) has become streaming, and I don't see anything preventing gaming going the same way. If you wanna stick with gaming, the majority tend to play on consoles and do view the advantages in convinience to outweigh the disadvantages in terms of possible fidelity, higher framerates and lower latency that a PC may offer (even in cases of similar pricing).

Concerning cloud gaming, network latency will go down, and the offered bandwidth will go up in most areas of the globe. With recent advancements in high quality upscaling, networking demands will also decrease. Physics is not a hindrance, unless I am overlooking something.

[katbyte]

Latency can only go down so much because as parent comment said: laws of physics dictate the minimum response time between two points given the distance. And it will be higher with each hop /media change

[Topfi]

Ok, but we were talking about the default, the average for the majority of consumers. Did any of them care about the far more significant latency that their TVs processing imposes (or did impose, as now many TVs switch to "game mode" by themselves) on their console gaming experience?

No, the majority never even noticed. The irreducible latency some are talking about is imperceptible, not a factor for the vast majority of the populus. Ease of use, lack of install times, flexibility, and ability to spread out cost, all will outweigh that.

[katbyte]

A lot of people discuss it when purchasing tvs, tvs often have game mode as you say, the entire 30/60 fps debate and how many gamers refuse to accept 30fps as acceptable, ping times in games and how variable they can get. Personally I can notice the difference pretty easily.

Lots of people do discuss this and do care, not to mention to even get to the point of it only being “the lowest possible physics allows” you need great home networking equipment plus a fast/well connected isp and a cloud service provider that isn’t adding any processing delay. That excludes a ton of people.

Cloud gaming isn’t going to be “the default” anytime soon, and for many people it will never be an option.

Heck physical copies are still super popular with a large group of console gamers to this day despite digital delivery being so well tested and ubiquitous

[akaij]

How "average" do we want to go? Because another slice of this average population will be mostly fine playing Candy Crush on their mobile.

[scrlk]

> Honest question, which of those is in any way applicable to this technology?

Speed of a signal travelling through optical fiber or copper cable? Additional latency of cloud gaming rules out genres that require twitch reactions (e.g. competitive FPS, fighting games, platformers).

[trgdr]

If you look at the market, this is a pretty small fraction of gaming revenue. Sure these things will continue to exist in competitive format, but a significant majority of gaming is not highly latency-sensitive in this way.

fwiw I like owning my own hardware, but pretending that cloud gaming isn't going to happen because of the single-digit percentage of gamers that absolutely need locality for competition purposes is just ignoring market dynamics -- there's a huge amount of money to be made in cloud gaming and that's really the only thing that matters.