Cloud gaming. Death of consoles?

[Tejas]

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cloud-gaming.html

[Siva]

Isn't this OnLive
And Gakai

Just made by Nvidia?

If so I have seen the future and I want no part of it until my internet is capable of <1MS ping times worldwide

[Psychotic]

The weaknesses outweigh the strength.

The main strength is that you are essentially using the power of another PC to play your games that then streams what's happening to your monitor. On-demand streaming works great for movies and music, in which you can simply "rewind" what you miss, but the downfalls of cloud-computing are multiplied when used for gaming.

The biggest pitfall with "the cloud" has always been reliability. Reliability has many variables, ranging from the hosts software and hardware to your own, but whilst you can control your own network to a degree it's virtually impossible to control how the host runs their network.

If the hosts servers go down then you lose access. You can no longer play anything.

Not only this but you generally cannot control where the servers are located, meaning what you gain in FPS you now lose in latency. 60 FPS is great but if you're getting 300+ ping on a shooter then you may as well shoot yourself in the foot, because your avatar certainly will.

The problems become multiplied when you realise that your entire experience is in the hands of somebody else, regardless of whether the game is multiplayer or singleplayer.

The bottom line is that for online games like Call of Duty or World of Warcraft then the downsides aren't as big an issue - you already have latency to worry about anyway - but for anything else you're better off upgrading your own computer and buying the games yourself.