Seems like the next logical step. Most big games are always-online Games as a Service where your local storage is useless if the company server doesn’t handshake. A lot of business and productivity software already requires subscriptions and is partially online. Every single fucking company wants to have an app on your phone so they can watch you in the bathroom. And there’s talk that MSFT might start moving Windows off the PC entirely and in to the cloud.
I figure at some point it’s in the shareholder’s best interests to prohibit users from actually storing anything locally. Storage is really just stolen subscription revenue, when you think about it. Every time a user accesses something on a local drive they’re stealing the chance for you to extort them in to paying a subscription fee.
What do think, too distopian? Back when tapes, CDs, MiniDiscs, all the old generations of data storage that you could write to at home were first circulating the media industries tried real, real hard to make them illegal to privately own. We’ve been fighting an escalating battle against digital (and analog I guess) IP regimes ever since then. Streaming has pretty much killed physical media afaik. I have no idea if blu-rays or DVDs are still printed for sale.
Idk, just a thought. Let me know what you think.
They won’t make it illegal, there’s no point. But, it might become impractical.
Imagine this, you have your whole desktop online, you pay for space as you use it, you don’t need to buy drives, your space just expands for your needs. Do you want to play games just for a short time? Well, you can just pay for the time when using a vGPU. In fact, a game could even make requests for a certain amount of GPU power, and you get billed accordingly.
Everything is on the cloud. So, what happens then?
Well, people would instead of buying a PC just buy some low power ARM based terminal. In fact, it’s likely many cloud services would include one at no extra price in the contract.
When the majority of people are using this system. What happens to the now “niche” home computer builders? Well, first parts will become expensive. Making less of the home based stuff will make it more pricey. Choice will become limited. It will be prohibitive to build your own. But also consider that online games might well also prevent you playing on your own hardware. It’s far easier to cheat on your own hardware than it is on strictly controlled cloud hardware.
I don’t think it’ll come to this, or if it does, it won’t be for quite a time even though this is entirely possible now (look at shadow PC for example). But if cloud computing in this form did take off in a big way, this is how it’d likely be and there’d be no reason at all to prohibit home setups. They would just become less practical and affordable all the time.