I don’t need to game from a coffee shop, but I only have one personal computer and am not interested enough in gaming to get a machine dedicated to just that
Gaming on an aeroplane is great, but that's a case where gaming-as-a-service is never going to work for obvious reasons.
LAN parties are great, but you don't need super-portable if you're packing for an all-day/overnight trip anyway. A computer that fits in a duffel bag is fine, and plenty of "luggable" gaming laptops qualify.
> Gaming on an aeroplane is great, but that's a case where gaming-as-a-service is never going to work for obvious reasons.
With current geo-synchronous satellites, correct. With the upcoming low earth orbit internet satellite constellations of which there are at least 3 announced and the spacex starlink constellation is literally launching their first batch of 60 satellites this week, this should be doable.
The whole point of a LAN party is to remove the internet and its associated issues from the network multiplayer equation. Streamed gaming from the cloud does the opposite.
Sure, but hardware is always getting better; reaching the point where we can build a thin laptop that's up to gaming is easier than online-based gaming. Frankly, the laptops we have today should already be up to whatever it is we want to do with them.
For me personally, that works too. If the price points are comparable then I would prefer an offline experience for single player games at least. However, for multi-player games I could imagine some optimizations that could be happening in the cloud giving them an advantage.
