Amazon Gaming Chief Says Soon We Won’t Need No Stinking Consoles
Specifically, what he said was this:
"As hardware becomes more expensive, and as streaming technology continues to improve, I think you'll naturally see more people asking whether they actually need that dedicated device."
— Amazon General Manager of Gaming Jeff Gattis
Here's the thing: from an executive's point of view, it makes sense, and this miserable future may be deeply tantalizing (again, from an executive's point of view). Gattis points to the fact that "only a fraction" of gamers own dedicated gaming hardware, which is a plausible extrapolation from the massive swarm of mobile gamers worldwide but which fails to account for gamers who play mobile games as well as games on other devices, and also for PC gamers, who may use their PC primarily or exclusively for gaming.
Cloud gaming is also attractive for executives in other ways. The biggest one is that cloud gaming means that the game software never actually gets transmitted to the customer's device. This (almost) completely eliminates cheating, and it also prevents users from backing up or pirating the software. Furthermore, it makes user modding impossible, which means game publishers can retain more control over the user experience. Finally, it makes every game a never-ending subscription service, and I shouldn't have to explain why corporations love that.
Of course, another benefit for corporations (and claimed to be a benefit for users, though it absolutely isn't) is that it greatly expands the addressable market for game publishers and cloud service hosters. If anyone with a smartphone can play the latest AAA games on your service, you stand to make a lot more money. Right?
The problem with this point of view is that it completely ignores the lived experience of gamers. I've personally tested GeForce Now, Amazon's Luna service, and Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming. They simply cannot provide satisfactory experiences at my house; fast-paced shooters felt intensely sluggish, fighting games were simply impossible, and intermittent packet loss caused visible stuttering and macroblocking like a 1440p YouTube video. That's not really a knock on the technology, per se; instead, it's a matter of physical reality.
I live in a place that makes most folks start hearing "Dueling Banjos" when they see it, so I'm simply too far from the data centers where these services reside. This adds a lot of lag, as well as packet loss due to the inconsistent quality of my DOCSIS cable connection, and that basically renders anything that requires any measure of response time completely unplayable.
If you live in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto, most places in Japan, or somewhere similar with a robust fiber connection, cloud gaming can deliver a great experience. Most people don't live in those places, or anywhere near them, and that's exactly where Gattis' remark shows his ignorance. It's true that many people around the world can't afford a dedicated gaming device, but that was true even before the prices went up. Those same people also don't have the internet connection required to enjoy cloud gaming.
Until global internet infrastructure (and physics) allows for consistently low interactive latency regardless of where a player lives, cloud gaming isn't going to be a viable replacement for local, on-device gaming. Moreover, there are plenty of devices on the used and low-end market that will play tens of thousands of games flawlessly. The idea that people need to jump to the cloud because they can't afford a $1,500 PlayStation 6 is pure fantasy from an executive with dollar signs in his eyes.
