you’ll get mad at me for saying this…but cloud gaming is so obviously more economically efficient than physical hardware I think it’s going to be the default soon. your home console / pc is idle 90%+ of the day. meanwhile, data centers targets what, 5%, maybe at worst 10% idle. every second a cloud gamer isn’t gaming, that hardware is being used for someone else, training, etc. I think there should be a new measurement, something like cost-per effective FLOP hour that takes into account the TCO + effective utilization. If a gamer spends $500 on a GPU, uses it for 3 years, but it’s only fully active ~5% of that period…the cost-per relative FLOP hour is crazy high! Meanwhile, a $50,000 datacenter GPU might have a *LOWER* cost-per FLOP hour just because the effective utilization is 90+%.

Pixel streaming is doable, and that has been proven for a long time now, but the claim that it will become standard has a very weird overlap with any data analysis over what's happening in the hardware industry. Compute resources are being scaled back for the consumer market because it's more profitable for companies like Micron to serve data centers because of AI. For the exact same reason, it's more profitable for the data centers to invest all their computing power in AI too, rather than in pixel streaming. Your claim that gaming on your own computer may become the least viable option for games is not necessarily wrong (personal computers may become prohibitively expensive in the short to medium term because hardware manufacturers can't catch up), but I wouldn't bet that pixel streaming will grow in the foreseeable future. In times where supply is far behind demand, companies tend to put all eggs in one basket (the most profitable one).