That is pretty much what I said, I said mainstream entertainment is becoming a service. As long as the internet exists as it does today people will have alternatives when they are provided by the creators. I just don't think EA, Activision and similar companies will have much reason to provide that alternative.

Depends on how much the smaller companies end up growing. The move towards turning games into a service alienates some customers, and from what I've seen it doesn't do anything to draw in additional customers. However, despite this the big guys have the big budget games that allow them to keep bringing in significant business. However, if the smaller studios end up growing and choose to continue to offer games without online requirements, while also adding larger production budgets, I could see the large publishers start to get squeezed out. Ultimately I don't think the move towards games as a service is a solid or rational business move, but that it's rather the result of people with control complexes and a degree of paranoia. I think that the resources and momentum of the large companies will keep them going in spite of this, at least for a while, but that as competition continues to mount they'll see a definite negative impact as a result of the direction they've chosen.

I just think the writing is completely on the wall for all media in the future being streamed through a service model, be it subscription or pay-to-access. The somewhat large PC resurgence we are in at the moment thanks to Steam and free-to-play games is awesome, but how long will that last faced with the pressures of mainstream living room changes? More to the point, even today is it anything compared to the power of Xbox Live?

I think Netflix and similar services like it for movies, music, books and games all show that we are headed to a place where the idea of owning media will be seen as ridiculous by my children or grandchildren. Assuming the free internet still exists companies could circumvent that and offer games as a "retro" download or something, but I'm not sure if even an indie would place much emphasis on this. I would assume there would be an indie channel or service which would provide that to the people who want it. I am also guessing the internet as it exists today won't be around forever and will end up much more controlled.

I could be wrong of course, I could be way off base, but I don't think so. Tablets and Netflix is our future, complete corporate control of media just like our cyberpunk fiction always warned us about.

Some years ago there was tons of peoples wanting Amiga games... yet Amiga faded away to be replaced by PC, there was no smaller guys that took over.

There is details to not forget with computer games... they need a computer to run on.

The issue here is that it's not just video games who are moving to the "allays online" paradigm its the whole market, from games to movies, to even word processing also it's a chain reaction :

- More and more peoples using always online, streamed and cloud based services, means that computer will need to be less and less powerful and have less and less local memory/storage.

- If means that the demand for "powerful" computer will shrunk which means that the prices will most probably rise.

- As the price of "real" computers will rise even more potential buyers will hesitate and will instead buy a cheap could based Chrome book like computers, which will even further lower the demand for real PC, lowering their market share and increasing their prices, etc...

- In the end the main market left for "real" computers will be companies, data center, etc... but no longer the average customer.

In the end what will developers, including Indy and smaller guys, do ?

Create an always online streamed game that will be playable on every 200$-500$ phone/tablet/computer or create a "normal" offline game that will be only playable by a bunch of hardcore fans on their 8000$ PC ?

And it's not a question of "IF" it's a question of "WHEN", the only thing we can do about it is to try to slow it down as long as possible.

That's not always true, I assure you there are exactly zero companies providing cell phone service in a way that people like in the US. A void in good service doesn't automatically mean someone like Runic will show up and give you the game you want. It can happen that way, clearly it can happen the other way as well.

I'm amazed at how people love to assume that the future will take one aspect of the present, magnify it a thousandfold and eradicate everything else.
"In the future everyone will use laptops", "In the future everything will be done on smartphones", "in the future tablets will rule the world", "everything will become a service and data will be streamed from the cloud", "PC is a dying platform".
Nonsense. Tomorrow will be like today. Except that it will be tomorrow. Unfortunately "things will probably be not much different" doesn't resonate with people as well as "X is the future !" -_-".

Let's see the media industry want to go in that direction, the software industry want to go in that direction, the hardware industry want to go in that direction and the peoples, sadly the majority, don't mind and actually like it.... so yeah what are the odd it ever happening...

Even if they can't predict the future when you have 2 on the left and 2 on the right with a big plus sign in the middle some weird peoples tend to assume that the result might look like four.

I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree on where things are going. I think there will always be a substantial amount of people who want to own their media, and that either companies will cater to this or a black market for it will grow until things come to a head and we see a partial collapse of economic system surrounding media, followed by a new system appearing that actually caters to what people want. But it'll probably take several decades to prove which of us is right.

And yet what we're actually seeing, and what we've been seeing, is hardware becoming both more powerful as well as cheaper, and although I think this will slow down as we run into certain physical limits to the microprocessor technology, I really don't see it regressing at any point. Additionally, thin clients and the SaaS model is not something new; businesses already went through this phase back in the 70s and 80s, and although certain elements have been kept where it makes sense, there was a move away from the SaaS model because of certain issues inherent to that model (data security, latency, control and accountability, etc), coupled with hardware becoming significantly cheaper. Right now I think we're just seeing a repeat of history, and that although adoption of thin-clients and SaaS will continue to rise for maybe 5-10 more years, people will end up rediscovering the same problems that moved most businesses away from that model decades ago.

A void in the kind of service people desire is a necessary but not sufficient condition for competition to fill that void. It also requires a sufficiently low barrier to entry and a market that is sufficiently open to competition. For cell phone service the barrier to entry is astronomical, not to mention the huge amount of regulatory capture that has occurred in that market, which basically ensures no new entrants to the market. With video games, on the other hand, the barrier to entry is very low, and the market is quite open to competition (the rise of multiple digital distribution channels has ensured that no one is in the position to act as a gatekeeper to the market).

And I say that it's the square root of 16. Just because something is simpler, doesn't mean it has to be right.

Whenever "everything" seems to be heading in a particular direction, you know what happens ?
I don't. It's usually something totally unpredictable and new. It's influential enough that suddenly things are not going the same direction nor back but in an entirely different way.
Once upon a time people thought that the microwave will change everything and people will only eat pre-made meals heated up in it. Is this the case ? No. Is something completely opposite the case and the microwave disappeared ? Once again - no. It has its place in the world but it didn't "CHANGE EVERYTHING".
All of this is lampshaded by steampunk.

Also - fashion (1930) and food (1957).

No, what we see is the big player of either CPU or GPU be it either Intel, AMD or NVidia going crazy and investing in SoC,if you compare the releases rate and release planning of new SoC chips to those of new CPU or GPU it's pretty obvious.

Not to mention that we are only at the very beginning of cloud based solutions, the only thing limiting/slowing it is bandwidth, but it's only temporary.

It's very different, the concept is not something new, but the technology behind it is.

One of the main things that killed Mainframes was the lack of scalability the limitations of the terminals and redundancy issues, a disadvantage that cloud based solution don't have, you can do nearly anything on the terminal that you could do with a standard PC and the scalability is nearly unlimited, and redundancy and/or disaster recovery is excellent too.

As much as I hate cloud based solutions as a "customers", they are a perfect solution for most medium/big companies.

I'm happy to grant you the barrier to entry in the most screwed up industries is high: banking, cell/phone service, internet service, etc.

Even so, the barrier to entry for certain types of games is getting pretty ridiculous as well (though not on the scale of cell phones). No indies will be pumping out the next NFL game (licensing) or the next Call of Duty. Will you see great indie games for all platforms? Sure, but that doesn't mean 90% of the games available might not get locked away behind an OnLive type service. How many PC games can I never play if I try to avoid Steam? A whole crap ton, that's how many:(

Like those who predicted some years ago that Internet will become something common that a majority of peoples knows and use everyday, or those who said the same for portable phones, they were so wrong.

You can't predict everything, but we are not talking about crazy prediction of what would happen in 50 or 70 years (even thought TV shopping, electromagnetic induction and infrared oven mentioned in one of your video actually exists today) or about a futuristic technology, but on which direction the industry AND it's customers want to move for the upcoming years using an existing technology.

So yes maybe there will be an aliens invasion or a huge technological breakthrough, that will prevent it from happening but otherwise it's a pretty safe bet to assume things will go as "planned" (And believe me that's definitely one of the case where I would LOVE to be proved wrong)

Also "things will probably be not much different" is not exactly compatible with "something totally unpredictable and new" :)

Without going into too much data I have to say that this is not my experience. I've helped evaluate a few IT solutions for the company I work for, and storing data or running programs on someone else's hardware was always a deal-breaker. There may be some business environments where cloud-based solutions may work well, but it's nothing close to the panacea that the proponents of cloud-computing like to paint it as. And in a consumer environment I think you'd end up seeing it being even more problematic, due to the poor quality of support that's endemic to the consumer tech market.

In short, I think that while certain useful elements from cloud-computing will be kept, most of it will end up being a passing fad.

The barrier to entry for AAA games can seem large when viewed on its own, but we're typically not talking about a studio trying to go from nobodies to producing a multi-million dollar game overnight. Rather, we're talking about a steady progression from a small indy studio to a large operation that can directly compete with the larger companies, provided they make smart business decisions. However, currently we're still in the early stages of this progression, so it'll probably be another couple years before we really start to notice any changes. Something likely to help this along, though, is that with more a more competing games coming out I think people will start to view games as being more fungible than they have been viewed in the past, making it more difficult for the larger companies to use their traditional franchises to drive sales and control the direction of the industry.

Cloud based doesn't necessarily means on somebody else computers, it can be on the company own data centers. And speaking from my experience, having worked "indirectly" for several big companies, they already barely have any server application installed in physical machine, all of them are virtualized servers in their data centers, and they are definitely looking for ways to get rid of workstations and replace by thin clients, they already tried once with Citrix but it wasn't that successful but as soon as they will find a solution working satisfactory they will make the jump without any second thought.

It doesn't seem to bother that much peoples using Steam, Facebook, gmail, google maps, and I am pretty sure it won't bother all those who are going to use iCloud, so it won't probably be an issue for the rest. Most peoples are not even able to tell if an application they are using are online, offline or both, and If anything it's easier for the average Joe to use a new Cloud based program than to try to figure how to put a CD in its DVD-rom drive to install it by himself.