[superkuh]

Good cause, but society has rapidly moved passed them just switching off games after people bought them. Now the hardware production companies for gaming are winding down and not producing gaming computer parts because megacorp datacenter parts have a much higher margin. The future of gaming will unfortunately be renting from the cloud; a context in which these "stop killing games" arguments will have much less leverage.

[nkrisc]

Then I will simply stop purchasing games and continue to play old ones that I can run on my computer as I please, online server or just do something better with my time.

The whole thing seems absurd when you remember that no one needs video games. This doesn’t need to be legislated. Let them kill video games and then stop buying their video games if they’re just going to kill it off. Why are people still buying games that cash be killed off?

If enough people are still buying these games then clearly the game being killed off is not an important factor. If it was, they wouldn’t buy them.

What does need to be legislated is how these games and services are marketed: it must be made clear latest date the service is guaranteed to be up.

[trumpdong]

This is a phase and data center parts are usable for gaming. (Yes even with all the rasterizer and texture units chopped off, we'll have a wrapper that does that work in compute shaders)

[mpyne]

> The future of gaming will unfortunately be renting from the cloud

That might be your future. But as long as there are computing platforms that users can run in their own home there will be games for them.

Nor do I think Nintendo will simply drop their hardware efforts to focus on cloud, and their customers have proven willing to pay higher prices for the types of gaming experience Nintendo will deliver.

[superkuh]

>Nor do I think Nintendo will simply drop their hardware efforts to focus on cloud,

Consoles might as well already be cloud for all you control them. But I guess I should've specified PC gaming. I thought it was indicated from the context of "stop killing games". Also, to be clear, I'll never "cloud" game or use consoles. I'll just remain in the past with old hardware and old (and new indie) games. But the "PC gaming industry" as an economic block larger than movies is dying and that's a shame.

[xpct]

Judging by the amount of people saying they've used and enjoyed cloud gaming I'm not as confident as you to make that claim. If cloud keeps making offers good enough such that people pick it instead of building their own PC, the number of personal devices will decrease.

I enjoy low-latency competitive games, and I'd say those are unlikely to get replaced by cloud, because many players notice latency spikes immediately. But I'm a bit skeptical of how much market value can be sustained by people who like the feeling of owning their own hardware, or feel the need to have lower latency in games.

I'm sure if someone built a data center within two blocks of my home and I was able to stream from it, many of these issues would disappear as well.

[mpyne]

> If cloud keeps making offers good enough such that people pick it instead of building their own PC, the number of personal devices will decrease.

Perhaps, but I never claimed otherwise. Simply that the personal devices that do exist will also have games for them. Computer games were here from the beginning, and they will be here in the end. And even personal devices that were chosen for non-gaming needs can play games, nothing requires games to run only on RGB-infested PCs.

> But I'm a bit skeptical of how much market value can be sustained by

Yes, the market dynamics may certainly shift, but that's been the story for decades already. And if cloud gaming were going to be this immediately-better story, things like Stadia and Luna would have performed much better in the market.

I think people worry about the cost-efficiency of how to do gaming in a world where hardware is expensive, but the reason hardware is expensive is because it's being sucked up for AI usage, not for gaming usage. So cloud gaming will also necessarily be expensive by these terms, even if the average cost seems less for a cloud gaming subscription than owning your own PC or console.

[jayd16]

Consoles already make you pay for online services. They already sunset games so I think even under the new rules they have the ability to stop that service at any time.

[vitalyan1234]

fortunately, that's been already attempted and despite the best circumstances imaginable resulted in a much welcome failure.

>On September 29, 2022, Google announced that it would shut down Stadia, citing its lack of traction with users. The service was shut down on January 18, 2023, and Google refunded all purchases for hardware and games made through the Google and Stadia stores.

even more fortunately, further attempts will fail for the same reason - input lag.

[bpavuk]

some timing-sensitive games such as Clair Obscur (parry) or I Am Your Beast (movement)? sure, they depend on low latency. that said, GeForce Now is, sadly, pretty good nowadays. enough to play a moderately fast paced game such as DEATHLOOP. Ukraine, streaming from Germany. 5 GHz is basically required, but in slower-paced games, on a phone, with 720p streaming, you can get by with 4G.

even games are not really a moat for owning hardware - next Gears with its timing-sensitive reloading mechanic can just get adapted for cloud.

if cloud gaming gets another hype wave for one reason or another, this time I am pretty sure they will lock in a much bigger user base. me personally? still committed to owning my hardware, but I can totally imagine my mother playing some RTS on a GeForce Now-connected tablet and having zero complaints.

[anankaie]

Clair Obscur was perfectly playable for me through GeForce Now, for what it is worth, even when hitting parry timing. (N = 1, but a datum nonetheless)

[vitalyan1234]

it is possible to adapt to input/network lag, sure. I played Doom 3 at 10-15 FPS in 640x480 and Warcraft 3 with 300ms latency, and I enjoyed it at the time, but I don't think I could endure such underwhelming experiences after many years of much better ones.

[bpavuk]

honestly I'd still throw a penny for at least a day pass if I'm e.g. traveling. getting that Duollistes or Locust fix on a train looks irresistible

[KolibriFly]

Hardware scarcity and cloud incentives are real, but they're also part of the same broader trend: more dependency on centralized providers, less control for the buyer

[tancop]

we still got newer companies out of china like moore threads working on gaming gpus, they had to pause new production because of the whole ai shortage but it looks like they might restart. is it usable for any serious gaming right now? no. but its already fighting the nvidia/amd monopoly together with intel.

as long as there is a market the producers will come, even in a super capital intensive industry like this. and it looks like nvidia is partially going back on the whole data center push with rtx spark. its just one high end product but it shows they know a lot of people want local gaming and local inference.