Streaming is terrible for gamers.

Streaming sucks. It’s terrible for gamers. It’s terrible for the environment. It makes it incredibly hard for developers to create good games. It is the biggest conformation that most CEOs in the industry could not care less about games, gamers, or anything else other than their own profits.<br><br>On a strictly financial level, it costs a shitload more to stream games than to just buy them outright. Since you are essentially renting access to a game, you are renting access to a game *for all eternity*. For an upfront cost of $60 a secondary third party company is now guaranteed a steady stream of income from you for as long as you want access to that game, or you change streaming services, or they change their terms of service, or any number of other things that have nothing to do with you.<br><br>On top of that, if you have to upgrade your set up to play the game, that’s just more upfront money that you are now dumping into this game, on top of the subscription money you are spending, on top of the money you spend to improve your internet, etc etc etc. The costs can add up incredibly fast.<br><br>And the environment. Oh my god, this is awful for the environment. I don’t have concrete numbers for how bad this is, but when all your games are clouded, that requires a lot of servers to be up and running 24/7. This in turn requires a shitload of power, cooling, maintenance, and replacement parts. All on top of the high amount of power your computer will be using to simply stream the games. Not to mention the hardware cost of upgrading your computer. If people are going to be streaming across multiple platforms, on top of work, school, etc, this is going to create a very ridiculous carbon footprint, and assurance that gamers are among the most polluting people in the country.<br><br>Now, onto the gamers. This is the most egregious part in my opinion. The lack of control this gives to game developers is staggering, and because of that, it is going to lead to some of the shittiest game development ever. Because of the lack of high quality internet in most rural areas, developers are simply going to avoid making games that are graphically intensive in any way. Why? That’s almost every game these days. But once you need to stream every game, you need to account for everything. And because it is the norm, you need to account for the lowest common denominator. That’s the rural gamers. So now you have a game that was once intended for next generation hardware to be slowed down because of the limits of streaming. It’s almost like the reverse of cloud computing. In cloud computing, the limiting factor is almost always the user’s computer, and once you move everything over to cloud, that’s no longer an issue. Here, the limiting factor will almost always be the connection speed, so once you move everything over to cloud, that is now the limiting factor. And that will *never* improve in rural areas. It’s the almost perfect melding of the two worst aspects of a capitalist venture: greed on the front of game devs, and laziness on the front of the ISP.<br><br>Finally, there’s the lack of access you have to the games. You don’t actually own them in any capacity, you just rent access to them. And if your service of choice ever goes down, well, you now have to find a new service. It’s like google Stadia all over again, but this time it’s all games, all the time.<br><br>Overall, this is a terrible idea, and the fact that these CEOs are willing to do this just shows how disconnected they are from the gaming community. Or how much they hate the environment. Whichever.