It's not the future of gaming or computing. Wily companies have been trying to sell us on the idea of having our computers connect to other computers to run everything on the client computer for several decades now, and have flopped incredibly.

Maybe not everyone here has been in IT long enough to remember each iteration, or the companies that have tried to deliver this vision and failed specatularly. Once, we called it "thin client" computing and tried to sell it to workplaces and home offices. Then we called it "grid" computing and tried to sell it to anybody. Now we call it cloud computing, and it's cool in that darpa-let's-build-an-aircraft-carrier-that-self-assembles-from-a-thousand-shipping-containers way, but it's basically the same paradigme rehashed over the past forty years: you purchase some commodity hardware that then hooks up to our expensive hardware which we bill you for.

The problem is that yesterday's expensive hardware is today's commodity. Cheaply available PCs glut the market and cut into the margins of expensive hardware, while creating a single point of failure (be it one machine or one internet connection or one supplier going bankrupt) and require excessive integration while precluding competitors and creating vendor-lockin. Any intelligent IT manager or director avoids this like the plague.

The result is that either the customer is forced to continue paying top-dollar for a service that steadily decreases in value as consumer PCs improve, or the company is forced to continually upgrade the entire infrastructure, rolling out expensive new hardware every year while paying growing bandwidth and electricity bills.

The above post was directed toward Raven X's post, which appears to have been deleted or removed, and the comments are not really applicable to saving a copy of your game states online, which could be fairly useful to people who change computers a lot.

Was I off topic? My bad, I tend to get carried away with topics and related topics I am passionate about. World At War wasn't that great but it wasn't too bad either. But I would have never known till I tried it myself. I was reluctant to get MW2 but I eventually bit the bullet and to be honest, except for the non-dedicated server issue (and the hacker issue a bit) I like the game and don't regret getting it. I think all those things you dislike about these games is what makes it better. I'm a sniper myself 80% of the time. The point of the game is to win, be it by running around with a knife, shooting the enemy from behind a concrete barrier or sniping them from across the map. The perks allow for the game to be expanded as oppose to just shooting the same old guns. It allows people to combine and test their skills with them, it's interesting to try to snipe a person running around with a running kit on their calss. It creates more of a challenge. Just shooting bullets get boring after a while, COD2 proves that. Once you face a person that never misses with the crappiest gun in the game and beats you you tend to wish you had a hack. perks give you hack like abilities without breaking the rules and giving everyone the same abilities.

I have Bad Company 2 but have not gotten tired of MW2 yet to dedicate time to it. I like the game as well just not right now.

I want to be connected 24/7 as well, what I don't want i to be dependent on it. Having a game stuck to the internet is a permanent thing but the Internet connection isn't. At anytime, anything from failure to pay the bills, damaged lines, faulty systems or natural disasters, can take the Internet away from us. Just like having the ability to listen to music without the need of a radio station or recording a TV show and watch it at your convenience; I want to be able to play my games (single player mode) without having to ask Steam or any other  DRM type of service permission to play that which I paid for. And then they wonder why people pirate things. You don't tackle a problem by punishing the legitimate people.

Technology may be the future, but it isn't everything. All it takes is a power outage, be it by natural causes or human error, and we can go from technologically advanced to cowboys and indians in a flash. Downhill is a lot faster and eqasier than uphill.

I have a friend in Australia and I was wondering how this is supposed to work for those countries that the entire internet business model is monthly/GB limits. That also includes most satellite internet users here in the US as well. Thinking about it, I could only see this becoming the norm if/when most of the world has affordable, low ping(re: no satellite), unlimited internet. Hopefully that is what the world is heading towards. Highspeed wireless from pole to pole, but it's still a ways off.

Oh no not there is definitely a finite in this situation. We'll get 24/7 with spotty connections in the first month, random server issues and attacked for abou 2-3 years then they, the all wise and powerful publisher will pull the plug, tell the players to screw themselves and buy the new game. Yeah, I can't wait for this.

The idea is that everyone has high speed stable connections that is either free or affordable. Problem is that wont happen for a long time so cloud computer will be very limited even if started now.

Yea, I figure it to become a utility just like electricity instead of a luxury. Instead of tied to your address just tied to you and wherever you are you just login to the world wireless web. I guess then it will be more like a world wide shield instead of web since it will cover the earth solidly.

And then the robots take over and we all die.

That was the 80's. Now if the robots take over, they use us for fuel

That was the 90's. Now if the robots take over it's because one computer program got confused about the 3 laws.

I've been doing my research into this for about 6 months following the development of the "OnLive" service. They have a expanded business model that allows the purchasing of games on the service, it also allows "leasing" games (like renting it from a store). I think is going to lead to a bunch of headaches. People will be "leasing" games for a limited time, some will mistakenly think they "bought" the game, and they'll get pissed when suddenly they can't play a game they paid for.

More so, another big "feature" of the OnLive service, and cloud gaming as a whole, is you don't need the Hardware to run the game anymore. It's all handled on their end and then streamed to you on whatever system you have. You might think "Hey, awesome, I don't ever need to buy expensive hardware again!" which if popular will see a dramatic DECREASE in PC sales. People won't buy $400 graphics cards anymore. The buying of Hardware will be limited to companies and big business and as such the prices will rise so the companies that make the high end parts can stay afloat after loosing all those home users it had as customers.

People will start loosing the technological capabilities of PC's because the hardware they will have will be bottom barrel Laptops. If all that proves financially successful then the only people who will want to buy high end hardware for themselves will be pirates who won't be able to afford the hardware anyway after the drastic price increases that will come from the private sectors not buying hardware like they do today. Even consoles like the PS3 and X-Box 360 won't be needed to access the cloud. Just the little box and controller that will be provided to you by the service you chose, and a cable connection, will be all you need.

As such the companies that make consoles won't make them anymore and will decide to make only games since the hardware won't sell. Just look at "Sega" if you need an example. They don't make consoles anymore but they still make a lot of games. Eventually, if this is the future of gaming, the only way you'll be able to access it is through these services because you won't be able to afford the hardware to do it your-self.

This will have far reaching consequences in the market that will do a lot more harm then it will good if it proves to be a success. As we all know people tend to go with the crowd and the most common denominator. If every kid on the block is playing all his games on "OnLive" then you'll want too also, parents will be all for it too since they don't need to buy a $400 gaming console, and big brother will be alive and well in the system making sure everyone is playing the games they want to sell. They'll monitor every chat and interaction you have on the system, and they'll study you so they can make more money. What's worse is they jam it packed with cool little "features" to draw people in and make it convenient. It will have live video chat, movie streaming, and a community of built in users to share it all with and people will flock to it in droves.

If these companies succeed at this a bunch of other companies are going to pay the price. It won't be pretty and the people who are going to loose out in the end are users who use their high end PC's for a lot more then just gaming. Believe me, the people at "OnLive" want nothing more then for you to never buy expensive hardware again and rely totally on their system. They even say so in a interview on Gamespot, go look it up, you'll see. They make it sound all nice and flashy, but it's going to drive a bunch of other companies to the point of bankruptcy and ultimately it will lead to our over-all technological dumbing down.

Don't worry, Brad. Soon every company will have it's own version of "Impulse" or "Steam" to sell it's games through. Eventually in fact that will be the Only way you get those games. Piracy will be a thing of the past because no-one will have a store bought disk to copy and hack.

Possibly games might be pirated if someone alters the file structure and re-packages it without the DRM but if the gaming files are all held on company servers it probably won't be much of a issue. Companies can always stream the content to the user through the cloud so technically the player doesn't need a disk or even have to install anything on their end. With no files to install nothing can be copied. People are also too stupid to realize they'll just be "renting" a game for full price because no system can stay online forever. Eventually they'll loose access to the games they "bought" and people will start getting pissed off. Also the pirate community as a whole probably wouldn't be able to distribute things efficiently that way, especially with nothing to actually "copy" and no streaming service of their own.

If cloud gaming takes off the way everyone expects it to then "Steam" and "Impulse" and other Digital Distribution methods will All evolve into similar services so they can stay competitive. You'll "sell" games over Impulse but no one will ever need to download or install anything. Instead they'll pay a flat monthly "Impulse Subscription Fee" and in return they'll be able to play any game on Impulse any time they want.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if cloud gaming is successful it will even threaten services like Steam and Impulse. We all know there are pirated versions of "Steam" games on the web. With the "Cloud" there's no files to download hence nothing to pirate. You're a smart guy, I know you can see how this will force even Digital Distributors to evolve. Eventually since the gamers will stop upgrading their hardware then the Digital services won't be able to "sell" a game because people's PC's won't be able to install and run them. Instead Digital Distribution systems will have to adapt to work in the cloud or be forced out of business.

I'm going to have to reserve my judgement here until OnLive goes, er, Live.  I suspect the repercussions of Cloud computing will have a negative impact on the industry as a whole; if the end users are no longer buying new hardware, the advances in technology we've been seeing for the last ten or so years will slow to a crawl as the demand for the new hardware dies out.  Potentially, we're going to be seeing interesting times ahead.

That's more or less exactly what I said in my two posts above, Don. Great minds think alike I guess

Ironically, it reminds me how drengin.net worked before turning into Totalgaming.net then into impulse (see https://www.stardock.net/media/article_indiesstrikeback.html )