NVIDIA believes consoles won't be around forever

Cloud gaming may be the future of gaming and it might even replace gaming consoles. NVIDIA strongly believes it is.  How about MMO games? Web services like Gaikai enables games like Lord of the Rings Online or Dungeons & Dragons Online run in a web browser. However, it's still unknown if Cloud Gaming is going to be the future of online games. 

NVIDIA: Gaming Consoles won't be around forever

According to this post at Forbes, NVIDIA Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang showed the next generation of gaming hardware at NVIDIA's GPU technologies conference last Tuesday.

According to Hsun, the future of gaming will not be anything but a gaming controller tied to an LG Cinema 3D Smart TV television set.

Huang also said that, over the long term, they will place the powerful graphics processors used to power immersive digital experiences in the cloud. Huang also introduced a new technology, dubbed GeForce GRID, made of NVIDIA's latest 'Kepler.’ processors. Huang says this new technology will power cloud gaming services like Gaikai, G-Cluster, OnLive, Playcast, and others.

What about MMO's?

Despite what NVIDIA believes, we can not know if this will be limited to the games we play on consoles today but not MMOs. It's hard to imagine a casual gamer to start subscribing to a cloud-gaming service to play f2p MMO games. The reason why some of the big MMO franchises turned free-to-play is because of the demand to ditch subscriptions. Now are we supposed to subscribe to a cloud gaming service to play MMOs? This wouldn't be much of a problem for subscription based games. Actually, this could be a fantastic solution to cut on the neverending PC-hardware costs.

The Secret World: Looks good, doesn't it? Well, not on every PC!

Hardware costs

I was playing The Secret World last weekend. The game looks fantastic. With my 26" LCD, and the default 1920x1080 resolution, and my thirst for the best-possible visuals, the game needs a hell of a powerful PC. Take a look at The Secret World forums and you'll see what kind of PC hardware some of the gamers have. Turn on Tesellation and Full Screen antialiasing at 1920x1080 and you need the likes of i7 processors and Radeon 79xx graphics processors. This kind of gaming, even if it is an MMO, doesn't come cheap. I personally am really tired of buying a new graphics processor every 6 months because there is this new game that looks great on a $500 GPU but crap on my 12 months old and already-obselete GPU. Someone has to take care of this predicament for the sake of gamers like me.

Cloud Gaming for MMO gamers - Not yet!

The cloud gaming service, at the present, is far from an ideal solution but if NIVDIA's Huang is right about the future of cloud services, with the likes of Kepler powered cloud servers, we might be playing these games on our mid-range laptops. Now, that would rock!

There are still so many questions I can think of regarding the future of cloud based services. Will we have to subscribe to multiple cloud gaming services just because we play multiple games? (Maybe, one of our favorite games won't be available on one sevice but another one?) 

I guess we just have to wait and see but it still sounds promising. What do you think?

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