Next-gen PCs to head into the Cloud?

My last post on whether next-gen gaming PCs (and consoles) are doomed has generated some healthy debate on what is going to happen to gaming rigs. Some of the commenters made the point that while recessions have an impact on business, the fundamental truth is that some people want their PCs to be as powerful as possible, and as such, talk of doom should be taken with a pinch of salt:

Smith: ‘These ‘doom guys’ need to chill out and learn to keep things in perspective. For example, in the car market, during a recession, the market will indeed shrink. But that doesn’t mean there will be no market at all. Some companies may need to close product ranges in order for car manufacturers to make a profit. But people will always need new cars.’

A more radical suggestion about a possible future generation of gaming PCs came from feathers633:

‘”I guess all the little power hungry gaming PC’s with quad SLI and crossfire will evaporate and we will just have very basic cloud terminals being fed from colossal super stream processing engines that are able to watch us whenever we have our webcams turned on. If we misbehave then the super cloud computing brain will deactivate our TV, switch off our lighting & heating until we beg for mercy.’

As it happens, I stumbled across a couple of very good posts on ‘the cloud’ today - one strongly negative, one strongly in favour of it.

Firmly in the negative camp is Jason Scott. F**k the cloud, he says:

Trust it [the Cloud] like you would trust a guy pulling up in a van offering a sweet deal on electronics. Maybe you’ll make out, maybe you won’t. But he ain’t necessarily going to be there tomorrow.

Kevin Kelly makes his pro-pitch by describing the cloud as ‘better than owning’, going on to draw a clever comparison between the way we currently use civic ammenities and infrastructure, and the way we could get hold of games, music and movies in the future:

I use roads that I don’t own. I have immediate access to 99% of the roads and highways of the world (with a few exceptions) because they are a public commons. We are all granted this street access via our payment of local taxes. For almost any purpose I can think of, the roads of the world serve me as if I owned them. Even better than if I owned them since I am not in charge of maintaining them. The bulk of public infrastructure offers the same “better than owning” benefits.

I suspect two main factors will influence how willing we, as consumers are to embrace the cloud:

1. Historical norms. People are used to renting films so we’re fine with streaming video (e.g. YouTube), but when it comes to music, we’ve spent most of the 20th century learning to love accumulating records/tapes/CDs/MP3s. Games, it seems, fall between the two; people are used to owning them, but at the same time, it’s generally accepted they have a finite lifespan in a way music doesn’t (I still listen to the Beatles, I don’t play Spectrum games anymore), and what’s more, increasingly online connectivity is a key part of the way they function.

2. Technical concerns. Streaming decent quality music is fairly easy - WiFi, even 3G can cope with it. Playing back the stream is easy, too; you don’t need much in the way of hardware to decode it. Streaming decent quality video is harder, although we’re getting to the point where we can stream TV-quality video and again, you can decode it on a netbook or portable device such as an iPod. Streaming a HD movie, or a game is far harder, and not only do you increase the strain on the connection, you can increase the strain on the playback device.

When it comes to PC gaming, I think a certain portion of it will move Cloud-wards; indeed, arguably it already has. At the low end (in terms of technical complexity), Flash games such as Desktop Tower Defence are already hosted on the web, while towards the high-end, MMOs already require a constant web connection, to the point that the only reason there’s any local content on your own PC are performance considerations. If Blizzard could make Warcraft live online and work on any online device (phone, iPod, netbook), you can be they would go for it.