If cloud gaming ever becomes the norm, the consumer will have no power left. That’s their end game, to lock us into platforms and extract subscription and when they can’t get more subscribers they will demand higher prices and add more advertising. People who are paying for game pass, are investing in this future for gaming.
I don’t disagree with the sentiment, but I don’t see even a single mention of cloud gaming in the article?
This is about studio closures and a disconnect between MS’s actions and the types of games they say they want.
MS surprise launched hifi rush with zero marketing, put it on gamepass day 1 then complains it didn’t meets ales expectations and shuts down the studio that made it. Now, 48 hours later, they are saying they need more games like that.
It may not be directly referenced in the article but cloud gaming was absolutely a part of what led to the closure of tango gameworks.
dsfgasfsaf
Sure that’s how it is now. As soon as the technology is mature enough, they will slowly begin to make a push for cloud only games. In that way they have total control. They can’t do it now because the technology is not quite there yet, and people is not ready. But you can see where they are heading. All business software such as Office and other cloud services is already there.
dsfgasfsaf
There’s also GeForce Now and they seem to be doing okay but at supposed 25 million registered users, that doesn’t seem like that much all things considered. For comparison, I can’t get the number of registered Steam users but they alone have around 30 million concurrent users on a typical day.
dsfgasfsaf
Gamepass isn’t cloud gaming, though. It’s a game subscription, but cloud gaming is only optional and only available for a subset of games. All of the games however can be downloaded and are played locally.
It’s optional for now.
I’d only take this as a valid point if you could point to any games succeeding in spite of being cloud only. When Stadia tried it, it kneecapped them.