I'm not sure the "streaming will never work" is accurate. Most games the days are online titles that lag anyway, that's not a show stopper.
But without some killer (or at least useful) feature, how many services like these are we going to see? I mean, "pay for your game, then pay us some more to run it on our server" only makes sense if you're a frequent traveler or fi you buy games but are too cheap to build/buy a gaming rig. What's the projected TAM for these services?
Its the very same as Uber, Spotify, Amazon and many other large tech based market shifts. All these streaming services aim to do that for gaming. They incur loss at the beginning to take over the market or a dominant share of it, and when the market share is sufficient and people are tied to services (Many ways to do this with games... doesn't even need to be legally binding, just create new carrots!), the prices are jacked up and the creators themselves are just one of many, effectively having become employees with no rights to fall back on. That's how Uber's taxi drivers basically work.
Meanwhile, because the services grow, the amount of time per play / per game goes down per customer and so the end result is that devs lose a share of their cut to yet another distributor (on top of the physical or regular sale %, if they are unlucky, Stadia is perfectly set up for this, for example). Now, it suddenly became even easier to buy those devs out, and capture even more studios under your wing as a publisher.
Amazon is also making games. What happened to them just delivering packages and being good at it? Hmmmmm... and what about EA, Ubisoft? This model applies to them already, and anyone invited to their platforms is ready for the slaughterhouse.
The writing is on the wall and we should not partake in this shitshow. Its a steady race to the bottom, and for physical retail that has already happened due to Amazon et al. Yes, its a market shift because of demand (we do more online), but its also a market shift we never really asked for, at least, not for its end game.
Some examples, from locally. We have a food delivery service called 'Thuisbezorgd.nl'. It started with free delivery and very low entry fees for businesses to use it. Today, people across the country are used to the service, and suddenly the businesses are met with more than doubled fees, sometimes even radical changes of contracts clearly in their disadvantage, saying as much as 'take it or leave it'. Thuisbezorgd.nl KNOWS they have the market locked now and they know the businesses can't take the damage of losing customers. Uber is not much different. The prices per fare always are structurally too low, up to the point that they barely cover
running costs of a regular employee. So yay, you have work... but you also have zero rights, its the modern day mob and it is considered completely normal. We should fight this, as customers, and civilians, even if it does give us some minor advantages sometimes.
PS. One might think 'but hey, Epic is also buying studios and taking market share for distribution, dafuq is that then?'... but Epic is precisely all about giving devs their own rights and capabilities, and make them more self sufficient in terms of funding. They're also staying far away from subscriptions for streamed content, as far as I know. At the same time, when they do move to cloud at the expense of the core service, they're instantly on my shit list...
And all of this is possible because of billions of risk capital, its a direct result of too much money flowing to too few people and entities at large. We're pretty far down the rabbit hole already.
