by Thoul » Wed Feb 27, '13, 8:24 am
Cloud Gaming is a nice idea in some ways. Being able to play any game on any device, without specialized hardware beyond a controller and internet connection, would be nice. The infrastructure needed to make widespread adoption possible still doesn't exist, though. Many areas have bandwidth caps on internet connections that are low enough to make cloud gaming impossible.
There's also issues about not actually owning a game - you can't have a disc or backup of a game if you're only playing it through cloud gaming. When the servers go down, either from outages or a company going out of business, the game is just gone. Today, I could go pull out my NES or Atari 2600 and play those as easily as my Wii or Xbox 360. One might not be able to do that with cloud gaming ten years down the line. That's enough to turn a lot of folks off the concept.