For comparison - cloud gaming such as Nvidia's Geforce NOW is at ~20$/mo for 4k resolution with a monthly subscription one can cancel anytime.
That's what, ~4-5 years of gaming on a superior GPU without the headaches of hardware failures or upfront cost of 1000$?
Yikes Valve. The only folks buying gaming PCs these days are people eeking out an advantage in competitive 3D shooters or folks unaware of how far cloud gaming has come.
Cloud gaming is nowhere near the same experience as playing locally. There are a lot of games where milliseconds matter; it's big enough for me and my friends to try Geforce NOW and say, "No, this isn't good enough for a lot of games." You are kind of saying, "the bus only costs $4 a day, that's 30 years of using a car."
No matter how superior the GPU, the latency from streaming will never be able to compete if you're outside of a major hub.
I couldn't imagine playing a game by streaming inputs to a server 30ms away, which then streams those inputs another 30ms to the game server, and then having that round trip.
60ms screen delay and 120ms total delay.
Fair. There's a free 1080p Nvidia Geforce NOW tier anyone can try to see if latency is an issue for them and the games they play.
One more data point - you're getting 1080p medium settings (for latest games) with a Steam Machine at ~1000$ upfront vs 4k max settings but 20-50ms added latency (for most people) for ~20$/mo without any longterm commitment.
That's where we're at. I'm in the 2000$ upfront to get max settings, minimal latency camp myself but I consider that to be a niche, luxury purchase category.
According to GFN, my ping is somewhere between ~20-25. I can see how it would be playable for the casual audience, but as someone who grew up on native gaming, it's not really playable to me for anything that's not turn based.
It's like how someone can play League of Legends at 80 ping for years, but once you're down to like 10 once you can't really go back.
of course you shy away from the fact that the string pullers in the world are hell bent on removing as much local compute and privacy from us as possible, so we can do nothing but use cloud services for everything from gaming to video editing. im sure the thought police would never use that to stifle dissenting opinions. your attitude displays a high level of unwarranted trust in these corrupt institutions and greedy corporations who all decided that making you pay a monthly fee for everything is much better for them than you buying something once, especially when all of these online services are monitored in real time for thought crimes by their ai systems.
OK. What if I want to mod my singleplayer game? Or, God forbid, make mods for it?
yikes, you will own nothing and be happy.