So, will be class this as a single player requiring an internet connection running much like the infamous Ubisoft system (they caved in eventually) ?

Last I checked although quite a few people are happy with Steam there are also numerous complaints about it, and Facebook is one of the most hated companies out there with its active userbase rapidly dropping. You are right, though, that many people would have no idea whether one of their applications was running locally or remotely- they only care whether or not it works. The problem is, though, that there are notable times when remotely hosted applications most certainly do not work, which often results in people calling friends or relatives like me, who then evaluate whether the remote service they're using is actually worthwhile or whether a locally hosted program would suit their needs better. There are some cases where remote services are a good choice, but there are also many situations where they just don't make sense from the standpoint of "how well does it work?" That's likely to remain the case for quite a while, and as long as it does remain the case people will continue to want hardware capable of running their programs locally. It ultimately comes down to having more options available so that you can choose the best option for any particular task.

( Who says Dia3 is/will be a Single Player Game ? They could make it into an online only game - but i dont believe that. )

The experience of gaming with Dia games in the past makes the online gaming so much diffrent from the single way, it's almost like 2 diffrent games !
Monsters and bosses r harder to kill with more people in one game and loot/drops r always much better too then ! So that's a serious +.
Ofc some games more then others have a fair loot system, while others like dia2 it's fo the fastest grabber first :D ( hence the zillion clans . . . )
This + the trading opportunities + the many friends from close by and far away :D make me play SP games Alwayz online.
SP games online have as much guilds, friends, stalkers, ... as any MMO game
Sadly the Battle.net Blizz will use fo D3 promises to be gamer unfriendly - but then i never new Blizz to do anything at all that would be good fo the gamers .

>>> And; o yeahhh, my money fo the future is on NO pc"s r whatever pads, pods .. with super or lght interiors.... :D Just one wall sized tv screen r projector ' any direction will do )
The cable providers who have digital packages to offer here got allready email and pictures sharing and things like that.
Basicly same deals as fo the iClouds and all those thingies i guess. Not so sure. . . i"m no pc wizz ( yet )
Or smells that too much of a Hollywood tainted future ?
And fo the rest, i suppose the idea r reality of freedom is important in all things concearning with pc's, internet, games, information, ...

I don't really understand that. Why would it be any more ridiculous to them than what it is to us? Do you mean our grandchildren will not ever encounter any type of media they want to own for unlimited use, e.g. because they want to listen/see it on many kinds of devices, anywhere, without any strings attached?

I personally think there will be options for different people. People have been able to either rent a movie for a couple of bucks, or buy a movie of their own for many more bucks, ever since the VHS times. Different people prefer the different services, and many times the same people prefer both for different media. While streamed music has become somewhat popular, it is still very far from surpassing people's will to buy mp3 music (DRM-free!) for their own unlimited use. Yet, for some other music they might still use streaming music services instead.

For now thinking that all games will be offered through internet as a service is just as plausible as how some people believed several years ago that monthly fee MMORPGs will pretty much kill single-player (PC) games, ie. no one will simply want to make single-player games anymore because there's so much more money to be made in MMORPGs and other online-only community games.

Well, to me it seemed that the potential userbase for all the MMORPGs fled to Facebook already, and game developers had to start making single-player games again. WoW is really the only one that remained.
PC surpassed Amiga simply because PC offered everything Amiga did, and then some. The same cannot be said about cloud services, always online games etc.

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Maybe, or the other alternative will be that "cloud services" face the dotcom crash. Maybe in 10-20 years everyone will laught how people in 2010 really believed word processors and all other applications would be used only through internet.

These things always seem to go in cycles. Do not forget that the whole IT world have already once moved from mainframe "everyone is connected from dumb terminal to a powerful central computer"-model to distributed model, and now people are predicting we are moving back to that model.

Even if we did move there, once again nothing stays forever. Maybe after that we will once again move to distributed model, for whatever reason (maybe it will not be called PC then, but something else). Sometimes things happen unexpectedly, sometimes for seemingly silly reasons. I mean, come on, IBM PC would become a major gaming platform for all homes, are you serious? Yet, it happened.

This also reminded the other discussion in this forum how to some it seemed that ISPs and operators are moving to capped internet connections.

Obviously we should "all" have uncapped and unlimited internet connections before the cloud services can really replace most gaming and personal app usage. That's just the first barrier.

If the ISPs and operators see a huge increase in internet usage, and don't seem to be getting any piece of the cloud pie, then possibly they will react by capping or charging more for the data usage.

Who knows, maybe China will be the next super power, and they decide how the whole world uses their services. Maybe they'd like everyone to be connected to the central computers located in Beijing, which definitely would make the cloud system viable.

I think there will be unlimited access options certainly, but in the Onlive kind of way. Everything will be corporate controlled. Why? Because corporations want to do that and they are seeing great success in getting consumers to accept it by offering certain perks.

Maybe, but there are quite many facets to this question.

For example, what is common with the most popular "cloud services" currently on PC: Facebook, GoogleMaps, GoogleDocs etc.?

They are all free to the end-user. Thus, it is not necessarily so far-fetched to think that while many people may be willing to do their gaming online on "clouds", they don't necessarily want to pay even a wooden dime for it (even for the simple reason that they feel the transaction itself is too cumbersome, especially if they don't have a credit card).

So while EA, Ubisoft etc. try to offer a monthly-fee "gaming service" with AAA-titles and even get some kind of customer base, still 95% of computer gamers would flock to Facebook, Google+ etc. just to play some AA-titles. Maybe that will lead to EA's and Ubisoft's demise, and Google will become the major computer game publisher.

I personally think several different ways can and will co-exist. Some people will use the online services (even pay for them), some will prefer to "own" most of their games with no strings attached, for many free games with ads are quite enough, many people will even play on all three.

Ps. What you or someone said about replacement for current internet (a controlled net): I think Microsoft already tried that with MSN. IIRC, it was their idea for a controlled replacement of internet.

If MS couldn't do it in 1990s when internet was still in its infancy as far as common users are concerned, I don't see how big corporations today could do the same.

Sure some governments talk about regulating internet like some bright politicians here have recently said that writing anonymously into internet should be prevented, but they seem to always forget internet does not end to their borders. Look at China.

The examples I am more looking at are Netflix, Steam, Onlive and streaming music services. Steam is not the same as streaming obviously, but the culture of corporate control and games as a service is built into it. The basic point is that consumers accept a loss of control and ownership in exchange for convenience and features and Steam represents that well. Once infrastructures are in place that pretty much guarantee consistent internet access more and more consumers will accept that as a requirement as long as they are rewarded for it with Steam-like perks.

It could go another way... I would like it if it did... but the general consumer does not care about playing a game 10 years later, or pay attention to EULAs. The average consumer wants a quick and easy experience and then moves on. Corporations are using that to their advantage to remove consumer rights. I don't have much optimism that it will get better as we get more digital and more connected.

I personally think most Steam users simply don't realize (yet) that they don't have any kind of "ownership" to their games, like that they are not entitled to play the purchased games if Valve decides otherwise. So it is more about ignorance than acceptance.

I was also thinking about streaming music, but my understanding is that most of the users are not paying for the service. Even there most people prefer the free choice.

On consoles the gaming services where you have to pay for the service may have a bit better chance of surviving simply because there the console company has total control of everything, but the situation is not the same in e.g. PC. On XBox720 Microsoft controls everything, and can keep e.g. Google out from coming to their market and offer XBox720 games seemingly for free (with ads).

But even then, more and more people might question why they have to pay for the games on their Xbox, when they can play similar or even the same games for free on PC, Google+ or Facebook.

As for commercial movie channels: while they have apparently always pulled their own weight, still at least here I don't know any person who has bought a movie channel in order to see movies (some may have a movie channel, but only because they had to buy it with the sports channel that they wanted). The real movie fans seem to prefer getting their movies on Blueray discs, and most others seem to be happy with the movies they get from free channels (I'm one of those, my box is full of movies to watch, I wouldn't have time to watch movies from a commercial movie channel).

Maybe the situation is wildly different in US then. I know the ISPs/operators here are advertising a lot the movie channels (incl. pay per view I think) you'd get if you buy broadband from them, and certainly some people fall for them also. But I have this friend who is irritated because now he is locked to one operator, because all the movies he has recorded from the channels are held hostage on operator servers ("cloud") and he loses them all in case he changes operator. He now says he should had never entered the agreement, but keep recording the movies to his own box/HD.

It makes sense

I can't speak for most people, but I assume Steam will go away at some point. I consider the games there to be long-term rentals.

But subscriber agreement aside, if Valve would just decide to start willy nilly deleting games from users, or shutting down services, they'd be hit with a class action suit so big they'd wish they were dead. That's no proof in case they go bankrupt, but I wouldn't expect steam to get away with it otherwise.

It's like, I'm ready to pay about $5 to rent a video, or about $15 to purchase the same film. Likewise, I'm not paying $50 for steam games, but when they offer a $20 or $10 sale, it's fine by me. If the fun lasts for 10 yrs, I'm pretty happy.

A lot of Steam games are playable without opening the application actually...I've only come across a handful of exceptions. Just go to your steam apps directory and run them manually. So if Steam did disappear, you wouldn't necessarily lose the ability to play your games (provided you had them downloaded).

I am a collector at heart. The idea of renting something for a certain time instead of owning it infinitely long and being able to resell it and control it completely is repeling me strongly. It destroys a lot of the worth for me. But what can I do against so strong forces? Almost nothing. :(

The class action suit would speak on behalf of the ignorance theory, not the acceptance theory. There'd be no class action suits if the users would have simply accepted that they have no rights whatsoever to the games they have "purchased" from Steam, but that they should be considered as rentals that Valve can pull away any time they want.

The class action suit would be interesting though, and quite an important precedent. I don't quite understand the rationale behind the class action suit though, if the only reason is mere ignorance from customers who haven't read the EULA.

It may be Valve (or whoever owns Valve at that point) would like some kind of settlement though, not because they fear losing the case, but because they don't want to be considered as bad guys. Hey, maybe they give the disgruntled ex-Steam gamers one freebie game in their new game portal that superseded Steam. :)

Blizzard has lost my business. Too bad to, I really used to look up to them. This kind of treatment is BS. Diablo 3 was THE game I was waiting for this year (or whenever it would come out knowing Blizzard) prior to this announcement. I guess it saves me some money but Its really sad to see one of my favorite franchises go down the toilet. I still have fond memories of playing Diablo 1 and 2 for the first time. I guess I can always go back to them again!