Greentext

Cloud gaming is effectively impossible due to little things like the speed of light. Sure, you could play Civilization via cloud but good fucking luck with competitive shooters.

I suspect people will just keep their existing equipment running for as long as possible, and secondhand equipment will be worth almost as much as it was when new.

This won't last forever.

Secret ending: you keep playing the huge selection of games we already have, endlessly, forgetting games you played a while ago as you restart one you already forgot.

Edit: currently playing Warhammer 40k: Space Marine. So far it's really fun. It's as if you're playing Doom as a more normal guy.

Batman Lego just announced it was reducing ram recommendations to 16gb. Its a start

The first ending has already been happening.

The second ending keeps failing to happen. We've got graveyards full of Cloud Gaming markets. Google Stadia, OnLive, Walmart's cloud service LiquidSky, and various smaller platforms like Vectordash and Bifrost.

Can't see either of these happening in the near future, TBH. They just failed making cloud gaming happen after pouring tons of resources into it, but I also just can't believe that companies that make severely unoptimized games are going to change their ways.

That said, most gaming is already on phones, and many of the popular multiplayer games are already running fine on very weak hardware.

3rd ending: Retro gaming makes a massive comeback.

The other good ending: People learn to disassemble e-waste and reuse stuff instead of throwing them in the trash. Think of all the SSDs, HDDs, and RAM sticks that are thrown out in old laptops and gaming consoles. It would be great to bring more of a reuse, repair, Maguyver, culture back to electronics.

I mean, if all new gaming becomes cloud based shit I'm just going to be playing old games on emulators forever, or at least as long as my computer functions. And then when that fails, I'll go back to analog enjoyments.

plays another 2,000 hours of dwarf fortress

We're just going to be demaking games incrementally as we scrounge older and older hardware for our mad max gaming PCs until we're playing a text adventure version of Minecraft on a green screen terminal.

Unless you're really chasing the big name games, you don't need that high powered of a rig anymore. Stylized graphics are better than highly realistic, they hold up better and longer. The most intensive game I have bought is STALKER 2 and even then my rig is holding up fine.

4th ending: The AI bubble bursts,AI companies goes bankrupt and RAM,SSD,Gpu and Consoles plummet to normal prices due to the companies selling their stuff.
5th ending: People move on to used/older PCS and Consoles.
6th Ending: People move on to older/simpler Open source/reverse engineered games that runs on Potato hardware.

If those Devs could read low level they'd be very upset

Cloud gaming only happens if people break down and pay for it.

But seeing the usage rates of Gamepass, I'm not encouraged.

Modders to the reacue, like always.

https://modrinth.com/resourcepack/potato-graphics

Or they use upscaling as a crutch even harder and we get narratives that include your character having frosted glass for eyes to make up for the blur.

If big corporation fail to improve their games graphics, then gamers will have to find other criterias to choose what games to buy, like gameplay and actual content.
If anything, it will leave more space for indie games. And larger productions will either stagnate on graphics or start producing more cartoonish content.

Wirth's Law

There are so many indie games and older PC titles, that it is not really an issue.

Cloud gaming isn't real.

Remote computing almost never makes sense. Budgeting for continued access inevitably costs enough to buy something local - less powerful, but powerful enough. One year university supercomputers could run multiplayer first-person dungeon crawlers. The next year, so could an Apple II. (Christ, $1300 at launch? It did not do much more than the $600 TRS-80 and C64. The Apple I was only $666.) Meanwhile a $150 Atari was better at action titles anyway.

When networks advance faster than computing, there's glimpses of viability. Maybe there was a brief window where machines that struggled with Doom could have streamed Quake over dial-up... at 28.8 kbps... in RealPlayer quality... while paying by the minute for the phone call. Or maybe your first cable modem could have delivered Far Cry in standard-def MPEG2, right between Halo 2 and the $300 launch of the 360, while Half-Life 2 ran on any damn thing.

Nowadays your phone runs Unreal 5 games. What else were you gonna stream games on? If you have a desktop, it's probably for gaming. Set-top boxes keep Ouya-ing themselves, trying to become "mini-consoles" that cost too much, run poorly, and stop getting updates. Minimalist laptops like Chromebook find themselves abandoned, even though the entire fucking pitch was an everlasting dumb terminal for the internet. The only place cloud gaming almost works is for laptops, and really only work laptops, because otherwise-- buy a Steam Deck. You're better off carrying a keyboard for normal desk use than a controller for gaming on the subway.

Alternative outcomes:

Gaming bifurcates.

Indies and certain AAs aim for the 'good ending', realize fancy graphics are not only harder to produce, but you're actually just shooting yourself in the foot in terms of potential customers.

AAA on the other hand continues to double down and enshittify, figure out new ways to turn gaming into leasing and renting.

... but, as always, mostly marketing, ad campaigns, paying off "journalists" and "influencers".

3rd potential outcome:

Something akin to lan parties/netcafes/arcades recurs.

Rent out a space, run a local to global network solution and also a miniature rendering farm.

All the actual PCs (or maybe VR headsets) are connected to cheap, thin client local machines that are then networked to the mini rendering farm.

4th potential outcome:

... nobody can actually stop people from emulating or running old, good games. 'Piracy' becomes as normalized in many other parts of the world as it is in Russia currently.

ohh don't worry, once they sort it out on PC, cloud console gaming 2.0 is on it's way.