There is no bait-and-switch, but this is going to change things.

The industry is scared of recompiling and how AI has driven costs for people to host their own servers. That includes games like GTA where a lot of recurring revenue is from people spending money in online mode.

Microsoft would "solve" that issue, as well as normalize more players to spend monthly instead of once.

“Nothing changes” for your DVD/CDs when Netflix and Spotify arrived.

I personally have my doubts this is going to work, but the thing this model does open up is mainstream games having LLM driven NPCs.

It seems businesses also believe this, even when it's plainly not true.

---

PS1 = 102 million units sold

PS2 = 160

PS3 = 87 million

PS4 = 117 million

PS5 = 95 million (June 2026)

---

These numbers would be bad alone, but two things make them especially awful. The first is that there's no meaningful competition anymore. XBox has completely dropped the ball whereas the PS2 initially had the original XBox (which wasn't great, but had novelty going for it), Dreamcast, GameCube, and others all viably competing in the same approximate domain.

The second is that when the PS2 launched in 2000 the US population was 281 million. Now it's 349 million. I'm using US as a proxy for rest of the world, instead of the global population, since we're mostly interested in the developed world as that's the market for game consoles. So the break-even point in terms of marketshare relative to the PS2 would be 349/281*160 = 199 million units sold, and that's if we assume significant competition.

So not only are people leaving consoles, they're leaving in droves. And that leaves the companies squeezing their shrinking player bases even harder, which will make people leave even more quickly. They've lost around 50% of their adjust playerbase over the past 20 years, and at this rate I doubt game consoles will even exist in 20 more years.

> People are in stockholm syndrome over it though and aren't going to leave.

Over the last year several people I know have independently told me console gaming just "isn't really as fun as it was." They're all buying fewer games and spending less time playing them (GTA6 will be an exception but for two of them it's the only console game they'll buy this year).

One is doing physical board games others are exploring retro gaming through emulation and loving it.

Basically everything Microsoft (deservedly) got shit for with the Xbox One, and which their reputation never recovered from, is bog-standard practice on consoles and plenty of games now.

> People are in stockholm syndrome over it though and aren't going to leave.

People usually dont - until the levies break, and they do. The PlayStation 4 won its generation, because people left XBox for it, in part, over game sharing (or lack thereof)

People are happy enough to spend their money on it though. (Personally I'm amazed people pay money for some different coloured pixels in a game, but in general I don't really like modern games. I aged out somewhere around the PS2 era and now mostly buy from gog.com or play emulators: I'm not the target market!).

Microsoft remembers that just a few short decades ago you'd pay a coin that was usually worth more than today's quarter to play at the arcade and got far less than an hour for it. You owned nothing and were happy for it.

A lot of big tech companies want to bring back those time because they believe the few decades in between where people owned and controlled their devices and software in a very open computing ecosystem were a mistake. So the aim now is to give you a device you pay for and use but never fully control, and software or media that you rent but never own.

> This service is for people who don't have that "expensive piece of hardware".

Right, but those people also don't own Xbox games. So this goes from "add-on fee to play the games your already own conveniently", to "buy a $60 game and then pay $/hour to actually play it"

Are you saving money in the second scenario vs buying a console? Almost certainly. But it doesn't feel that way to the person paying a big whack upfront and then also stacks of game time.

> It's definitely against the license terms you get when you purchase a game through steam to run it on arbitrary hardware

Is it??? I don't see anything in the Steam agreement about what hardware I am using?

IANAL.

Here's a random example from the Skyrim EULA:

   [You may] use one copy of the Software for your personal, non-commercial use on a single home or portable console or computer.
   ...
   [You agree not to] use or install the Software (or permit others to do same) on a network, for on-line use
   ...
   Installation on a network server is strictly prohibited, and this Agreement shall not serve as a network license in any manner.

> there hasn't been much of an issue around it. I think most developers have come around to the idea that it increases game sales.

Cloud gaming is too small to be relevant in any way. That’s why it’s ignored.

>> Why would companies withdraw licensing agreements? They get money from Nvidia

Lawyer reasons: Because they have lost the rights themselves. They may have licensed things like artwork/music for sale during a fixed period and so ongoing subscriptions, continual resales, would require renewing those licenses. Just look at the recent re-release of Mike Tyson's Punch Out, which had to remove Mike Tyson.

Evil reasons: They want to publish a new version of a game, say SimCity 11. The target audience is largely people already playing SimCity 10. So they discontinue SimCity 10, turn it off, to "encourage" the customer base to forget SimCity 10 and "purchase" SimCity 11.

Petty rich guy personal reasons: Say you are George Lucas and you have published something embarrassingly awful, like a Star Wars Christmas Special. The die-hard fans love it, or at least want to see it. But you are embarrassed. So you discontinue any concept of streaming/rental/sales to hide your shame, regardless of profit motivations. Also, Han shot first!

They weren't getting money from nvidia, and really why should they? nvidia provides very expensive hardware on which I can access my own steam library, etc.

The world of IP isn't just about selling someone something, it's about reselling the same person that thing many times over. So now I have my VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, digital streaming, 4K digital streaming, 4K digital streaming HD collectors edition, etc. variants.

And of course if there are multiple cloud gaming providers, they see it as an opportunity to extort each of them.

When GFN first came out it had all of the Civilization games -- and it worked great -- but then as other cloud gaming options appeared 2K pulled the whole catalog, presumably with hand out. When Civ VII came out they suddenly allowed it all again, not only to rekindle interest in the series and presumably because some people were only going to buy the game if they could play it on the platform.

Game companies don't want money, they want all the money.

Game streaming services like that are harder to reliably hardware fingerprint and introduces unusual install patterns (same game potentially repeatedly installed large amount of times by same user).

For DRM and ban avoidance detection this means either false positives (which is bad rep) or if it's tuned to ignore those signals on specific service provider hardware makes it easier to do account sharing (and thus not buying the game).

if we've learned anything from movie and show streaming then yes, publishers will absolutely all start their own game streaming service if it ever takes off. nice that Microsoft is building a gaming monopoly, can't have multiple platforms if there's only one mega-publisher.

Some independent developers have stated they don't like that the experience is degraded on GeForce now (because of latency, control bugs, etc). They prefer that users are running the game in a way that they've tested themselves.

(Source: owned and ran a netcafe for 10 years)

Just a correction: Netcafes don't have to get special licences. I'm not aware of any such licences existing anymore. They just buy however many standard retail copies or online accounts they want. Sometimes a publisher will see the marketing value and will provide some copies/licences at no charge.

Going back 15-20 years or so, Valve used to run a "Cybercafe Program" that was a large monthly expense for cybercafes, but shut it down after a while because it wasn't worth the cost of administration. Now cybercafes buy Steam accounts same as any end user. Asking any publisher for a cybercafe or "commercial exploitation" licence always invoked the response "Um - no idea?" from any department you asked, coupled with "We're afraid to suggest anything" from the legal department and "just use standard copies I suppose?" from the marketing department.

Do you need to have purchased the game at those cafes? Cause you do at geforce now. Game publishers who withdrew from geforce now are just greedy.

There are a few models.

- They have majority of popular games already installed but you need to log in to your own steam account and only have access to the games you already own.

- They provide an in-house account and offer games available in that account to be played. This is usually for cafes offering playtime for console games.

- Partnerships with games studios/publishers, but really I only know about this in Korean PC Bangs for specific games where some content is locked. For example in League of Legends, you unlock playable characters over the course of playing the game so a low level account might not have the full roster unlocked. If you log in your account to affiliated PC Bangs, you have all characters unlocked while playing there.

Well it is bad user experience. While GeforceNow allos me to connect my steam and epic account, the list of games actually playable is not my collection there, but the subset of games nvidia has a licensing deal (a lot less). Also they are free to remove support for games - as happened when big players withdrew their licensing.

I've seen tech videos from LTT and alike where they build remote gaming rigs using windows Hyper-V with GPU passthrough to the guest - that is essetially what they should do, and let me rent a virtual machine with hardware support and low latency video compression. I don't see a reason you would need any licensing deals there.

That is very different, because the netcafe own those games. This would be like needing to rent the computer at the cafe, bringing your own purchased game, but then the netcafe also needs a license to allow you to play your own games at the computer.

That heavily assumes MS does not increase the price, which has been proven to be false when they increase Gamepass price in the past.

"Average" probably means the mean here, not the median. So it's not half who watch more than that. There's probably a big gap between the mean and the median. Nobody publishes the median because that number is published by the ad industry which has no interest in showing the lower median.

TV can be passively watched though while you do other things. Gaming has to be actively engaged with

Is that statistic active watching, or skewed by those that leave it on 24h news or shopping or whatever 24/7?

The reality is that proprietary HW from past console generations can be significantly improved and made less expensive via modern tech advancements to provide a superior gaming experience without load times or latency. A $200 modernized PS2 or $100 modernized SNES will dominate gaming long before streaming does.

> AIs can't open source games, they can only assist in pirating them.

AIs should be able to use the same clean room reverse engineering techniques humans use in order to produce a legally clean open source game engine that can use the original game's copyrighted assets.

Illegality isn't going to stop anything. It's going to happen regardless.

Fixing this requires the end of free personal computing as we know it today. Every computer must become a walled garden. Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for must be destroyed.

Or if you do own the hardware it'll be a simple thin client.

Copyright infringement has always been trivial, but the same couldn't be said about reverse engineering. AIs changed that. The market fot remakes and ports is now threatened. Instead of just waiting ages for some company to port their games to PC, people can just do it themselves.

If your dishwasher costs 20 quid for a single run you have hired an actual human to wash your dishes. Same with your laundry example, those numbers are insane.

They are also irrelevant? I'm not really sure what point you're making?

I think game streaming is fine. You're still buy the games, you can still play them locally. I really don't see the issue. The Stadia model was bad, sure, but "rent out a gfx card over the network" is not something I think is worth ruffling your feathers over.

If you rent in the cloud for 24 us cent per hour it works out to £195 in year with 3hr/day gaming. An Xbox Series X costs like £650 so the extra £45 you pay for streaming from a data center means your purchased Xbox will take ~15 years to pay for itself.

If you can't profit off of your product sufficiently, because not enough people are interested in the experience that streaming provides, then you can no longer justify even making those games and it all becomes irrelevant. So, in the end you release your game to local hardware anyway.

They can't simply copy your game and reship it, because that would be against the copyright laws in most places where these companies make their profits from. Making something sufficiently new would be technically legal, but it would also take massive computing resources even with LLMs. That's either local compute time or cloud spend.

I think the bigger risk is just brand new games being generated of all kinds rather than the more expensive and legally risky full decompilations. Mass generation could start saturating the market and soaking attention. The low end indie market is already pretty saturated and in the end games have to be appealing, review sufficiently well and find an audience. Plenty of good games have barely sold any copies.

So almost a bigger question will be, how will AI impact the marketing industry?

The ones built into the TVs suck because they don't get updated and are usually really slow and choppy to use. Everyone I know who doesn't use an HTPC, uses an Xbox or PlayStation to watch stuff.

Another 2019 classic https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/ceuy4w/comment/eu56...

Good thing Microsoft is known for maintaining good quality.

They certainly made a loss on this guy but it is far from "stupid" from a consumer perspective.

Yes, I understand that. My point is that 2x Teslas are overkill for gaming - his power bill is so high because he's using an expensive ML inference box to stream games.

That's fair, and honestly is my preference as well.

On top of that, the Steam App is a bit janky, so much so that I just hauled my gaming rig out, plugged it directly into the TV, set Steam to launch at start-up in Big Picture Mode and bam, good to go.

Can't wait for the Steam Machine though...

Steam can stream any game, but non-Steam games do need to be set up on the computer to launch through Steam to work properly.

Correct, it was LG — though I see no reason to assume that other smart-TV manufacturers aren't doing similar things. Perhaps not quite as egregiously as LG, where the TV's microphone was picking up conversations in the room even when the TV appeared to be off (but was actually in standby mode). But I would assume that if a smart TV from any brand is connected to the net, it's transmitting data home about what you watch, what ads you sat through vs fast-forwarded, and so on.

Yeah, those are "introductory prices", after all...

Do most people keep their old consoles or do they generally replace them with a newer one? And even if they keep them, do they actually use them or do they end up in the attic? And I guess you could always get one ten years after the release for little money.

Based on my personal observations, most of the local zoning restrictions in the US come from conservative local residents, and not a cabal of developers. The latter want to build.

And I am using the word conservative in the non-political sense here - opposed to change. The individual motivations are many, but ultimately, a lot of people tend to avoid change around where they live.

Do you think commercial real estate are backing maintaining single family zoning in places like Palo Alto, or do you think they'd actually benefit from tossing all the zoning, and being able build, sell, and rent as many office buildings and apartments and condominiumns as possible?

Real estate development is a pretty competitive business with few barriers to entry. Nobody controls enough of the market to make it worth trying to restrict other developers.

In most cities it's developers who are pushing councils/government to rezone land so they can secure additional development sites.

I don’t think so - those companies are atleast modestly pro growth. They want to do more projects. In NYC and Boston local residents talk about “evil developers” who want to replace vacant lots with homes and businesses

It seems to me that the indie games scene has shown quite a lot of creativity.

Server GPU/memory has also been getting more expensive along with normal customer stuff. Hyperscalars with a lot of hardware do try to keep prices constant for a bit (since prices for hardware they bought is amortized), but they too are bound by economic markets and have to raise prices.

Treating anti-consumer practices as the "logical conclusion" while failing to give one is annoying. What you stated doesn't solve the fact that many people want to play games with others online, it is not just about assets.

It seems like the industry is on a quest to see what's the maximum price that people will pay for convenience

No Valve system is console like. The PC / Console difference has always been that consoles are a walled garden. Consoles are PCs to be easy to use and not allow unauthorized software to run on it.

Yeah, it sucks. These are corporations whose business it is to restrict our freedom. Their software is literal malware meant to pwn our machine and restrict what we can do. Their invasiveness is the least of it.

I advocated so much against it. I was so sad when I saw that virtually nobody cared. It seems games are more important than freedom.

Would like to see the ability to boot into a secure system that only has the game and maybe discord.

Even consoles still rely on gamedevs running Windows to do the actual development. No reason steam boxes won't end up as a native target for those same developers, assuming Valve plays their cards right

> ...a new computer for $1500...

How often do you buy new computers? I paid something like 2500 USD for my Threadripper machine (including 128 GB of RAM and graphics card) ~seven years ago. Between now and then I paid ~580 USD (at the end of last year) to get a new graphics card and that's it. After last year's upgrade, I've yet to run into a game that it doesn't play reasonably, and I've also gotten a lot of work done with it over all the years I've had it.

The console lifecycles being like a decade long has been a fantastic blessing for us PC gamers. Most AAA games are intended to run well on those ancient almost-PCs, which means that our old actually-PCs usually play the games just fine.

from your perspective this feels like a positive, then, no? cheaper price per hour, no requirement that you use those hours all at once?

Physically xcloud runs on Series X boards where each board is software divided in 4 Series S. When you stream a game you have sole usage of the 1/4 of the phisical device