Playing games in the cloud has been possible for many years now, although prior attempts to make it a mainstream hit have floundered, even in the hands of big players like Google and Amazon. While complaints over latency and visual artifacts were legitimate in earlier eras, especially looking back at largely forgotten cloud gaming services like OnLive, these have largely been addressed.
What’s finally pushing more people to choose cloud-powered play over locally hosted experiences isn’t the technical aspects, but the cost. Let’s talk over how we’ve reached this point, and why player-owned gaming hardware might soon go extinct.
The Eyewateringly Expensive Reality of Modern Gaming
The spike in gaming hardware prices seen in recent years is unprecedented, and it’s the AI boom that’s to blame. Back in the day, you’d expect consoles to get cheaper year after year, but a combination of chip shortages and RAM price hikes has led to the opposite. The same trend has hurt the PC gaming space, with Valve’s recent announcement of Steam Deck price increases causing consternation among fans, and everything from GPUs and RAM to storage devices suffering a similar fate.
Put simply, players have a simple choice: pay a lot more for gaming hardware that is only getting more expensive by the week, or stick with what they’ve got and sacrifice access to the latest and greatest interactive experiences. Cloud-powered solutions provide a third option.
The Appeal of Cloud Gaming
There’s a lot to like about gaming via the cloud, and the price is the first talking point. A monthly subscription grants access, and there are even free-to-play games available this way, so you don’t have to find a large sum upfront to get your foot in the door.
Variety is also unimpeachable. If you’re a fan of console gaming but you’ve got a PC, Xbox’s cloud gaming service means you can access a large library of living room-friendly titles from your desktop or laptop. If you’re into gambling, Tikal Casino’s official website provides hundreds of slots and table games, as well as live casino play, on any number of devices.
Lastly, there’s the performance and compatibility talking point. With gaming hardware costing a king’s ransom these days, actually being able to run modern titles at decent frame rates is a big ask. Offloading the heavy lifting to cloud servers that have far superior graphical and processing grunt than the average home console or PC is an obvious solution.
A Long-Term Prediction
It’s apparent that AI isn’t going anywhere, so the impact it’s having on gaming hardware prices due to data centers buying up all the key resources that would otherwise be going to consumers won’t abate in the foreseeable future.
As this state of affairs continues, the incentive for more people to get into cloud gaming will intensify. So, what has started as a quiet revolution among those in the know will eventually blossom into a full-blown revolt, and the gaming industry as a whole will have to take notice.
