PC Gaming Resurgence in 2012?

[FS~Phat]

Originally Posted by hiro

TLDR version:

PC is king for a while, but cloud computing's' popularity will change things.

snip....

Yes I agree however I think you'll find more closed system game clouds in the short term. Think Amazon and the kindle and Apple and the idevice for examples. They are the true innovators in the market but its still some time away before the economies of scale truly swing gaming to the cloud, even on the relatively low powered handheld devices of today, little lone the beefy PCs currently needed for gaming. It will also be 4-5 years before our Australian national broadband network (NBN) roll out delivers fibre to the home in large scale sufficient to support that kind of remote computing. But it is coming and it will happen.

Im actually a Cloud evangelist so you dont need to convince me (see www.hostingguru.com.au ), but I think it will be 5-10yrs at least before the planets align. Even then there's still the issue of the commercial model even if technically it could be done. Who's going to fund the massive data centre and server farm investment needed? Until you make a centralised computer farm powerful enough for lets say $60-70 per month on a subscription model I just dont think it will stack up financially.
Would you pay $150 per month for unlimited internet with a cloud compute account?? Not when you can currently buy a PC for $600 and unlimited internet for way less.

So there's a few technological issues to overcome in the data centre and the network before its even technically viable, little lone financially. Its hard enough now in the corporate world to make cloud computing cost less than in-house IT. Its getting very close though and will break through in the next 2 years when it becomes mainstream.

So in the mean-time, Im happy to keep building my mini super-computers, but I know in 10years it just wont make any sense to have that kind of computing power at home when massively parallel computing chips will be the norm in data centres with a subscription model.