I just got done reading this article off of http://arstechnica.com and let me tell you the concept is pretty cool.
But what could the consequences be. The casual gamer is arguably one of the largest audiences for hardware vendors. These are the people who buy last years latest and greatest video card once the price has dropped to an affordable level. They don't upgrade their hardware every 3-4 months but instead tend to be running on systems that are 3-5 years old.
If suddenly there was a large server farm in the internet cloud that I could connect any PC up to and get an experience that is on par with a 4 month old computer would a person ever upgrade their hardware? My guess is that they wouldn't. They will happily pay a monthly fee and not have to worry about the technical details about the hardware they are running on. The trick will be to charge enough money so that not everyone just jumps on board this system.
If something like this was free or so cheap that it might as well be free then hardware manufactures will see vastly plummeting sales. A server farm which will be able to optemize load across many machines will likely not lead to as many sales as it did in the past.
However the benefits for game companies could be dramatic. Suddenly an entirely new market of people gets opened up for the top of the line games. I can now create a game that pushes the limits of computing and not have to worry if my hardware requirements make it too restrictive to play. The possibilities are large...
Feedback/Questions
If you have any topics you would like me to cover or just general feedback on blogs I have written feel free to email me at helloriker@hotmail.com.
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