There will always be room for tinkers working on their gaming pcs; the age however of everyone having to shell money on them is going to give way to cloud streaming games.
I have talked about Nvidia’s GeForce Now many times on here. I think that the service is great for those who have great internet connections and lots of bandwidth. With an internet connection, you do not have worry about the system requirements only the strength of your internet connection and to a lesser extent, the location of your router and bandwidth usage. Such requirements are easier to deal with than the arcane internal structure of computers.
The Strength of Nvidia GeForce Now
The main strength is the ability to play any device you have. This is a major change which will bring more opportunities for different kinds of gamers. One of the issues we have with our gaming industry right now is that there is genre orthodoxy. You simply cannot be syncretic like in the past; your game has to be certain way or have a certain style.
This is where the RTS genre began to stumble after the release of Empire Earth. There was no sense of how the genre could move on with Starcraft breathing down its neck. Starcraft II, while a great game, would ossify the genre and prevent it from growing here. There were many experiments and crossovers such as Activision’s Battlezone series. Such experimentation is rare now.
This is what Nvidia GeForce Now can bring to the table.
What we need in the gaming space is an opening up of the player base. Sometimes we are too arcane in the way we talk about our games. Sometimes we need new perspectives to help innovate. This isn’t to say that our traditions are not important, but we need to take our time to invite newcomers.
This is the only way that the industry can truly start being healthy again. New perspectives will beget risk but no great artform was able to change without someone taking the first step in an uneven river.
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