Gaming Streams - Pit or Panacea

Streamed gaming has some really attractive features, but they come at a high cost.  For those who don't understand gaming streams, this is a new digital phenomenon where services will render the graphics of video games and then display them to you over a virtual terminal with which you can play the game. Think something like Microsoft's Remote Desktop, but scoped only to a single running program (a game).

For a user, streaming a game has the following amazing benefits:

• No installation is required.
• It is hardware independent, as long as you can I/O to the stream, you can play the game. Even Mac users.
• Hacks or exploits are impossible, making competitive play more fair.
• The compute required to operate the game is no longer your own responsibility to provide.

There are more, these are just the key benefits off the top of my head. But as gamers adopt this delivery method as more and more the "standard", I would urge a significant degree of caution. There are a number of reasons that adopting this delivery model as an industry is potentially a catastrophically bad idea.

Why is this a bad idea? I'll break it down.

1) Content control means company control.

As the game-streaming services ramp up, we have several services competing for your gaming dollar. However, as market forces evolve, winners will clearly emerge where the only real players in the space will be reduced to a small handful of companies. These companies will then have very real and direct control over which games you have to choose from.

2) The loss of the independent game company. 

Since the content is controlled, it will then stifle the growth of independent game developers. How does this happen you ask? Indy developers will never be given the chance to grow and become big game companies. A prime example of how this happens is the podcast. The landscape evolved from a ragtag group of independents to a star-studded list of mainstream media types dominating it. Thereby suppressing and limiting the growth of the innovators that made the media amazing. Now the Top 10 Podcasts are pretty much a stagnant list of the same old suspects, forever.

3) Kiss modding goodbye.

Since code is no longer installed and run on a machine you own, that means you will always run the code that is running on the stream. This means any change, option, or setting, will be vetted, and gated by the streaming company in question. To publish a mod to a game, it will be necessary to "clear" it with the streaming company who will then either give the thumbs up or down, thereby deciding for you which mods you have the opportunity to run.  Ok, everyone sees this as an inconvenience and really most gamers mod very very little (unless you're a Minecraft player). The problem with this is that so many times in the past entire game genres have been born from mods!  A mod is simply a slight tweak of the game to affect a change in play that reflects a different idea than the original creator intended. This doesn't sound big, but without modding DOTA would never have been created, nor the entire MOBA genre. Modding is at the core of Minecraft, and without it, there would really be no Minecraft as we know it. In a streaming world, these innovations simply never would have been realized and we wouldn't have missed them.

4) Your choice will no longer be yours.

Right now you can choose to play any one of millions and millions of games. Whether you install it from CD (WTF?), download it or stream it. The choice is yours of what you play. In a streaming world, the palette that you choose from is far more limited in scope, and denies you the opportunity to even know what other options exist. As streaming services become more and more prevalent game distributors will take them more and more seriously, and eventually will distribute only to streaming platforms. As that change permeates, people will stop installing games and they will, instead, rely on the choices provided by the streaming services.



In the end, you will decide the fate of video game streaming. If you subscribe to, pay for and promote the usage of streaming services, you are selecting a future that essentially limits your future choices. But hey, maybe you're one of those people who doesn't like choice, and that's OK. Until it's not. In this paradigm, the list that is provided might not contain anything you like. And in this pit where innovation has been stifled and the independents run out of the field,  video gaming will simply wane into another footnote of human entertainment, like pogs.

Not all change is growth, but growth demands change.  I think before we hand the keys to the castle to a vaulted few, we should take a moment to consider: Do we really want this?