This is
ing
ridiculously stupid. It's not going to work. The video quality
will be shit. There
will be considerable lag. There
will be issues due to the monthly bandwidth limits that most ISPs have in place. There
will be situations where all of their render machines are filled up, and users will have to wait in line to be able to play a game. This company
will be out of business within three years.
An hour of 720p video is typically going to occupy several gigabytes. Comcast, for instance, has a 250 gig per month cap (up and down). You'll be dedicating most of your monthly bandwidth to this service, if you do any large amount of gaming.
There will be lag. No, there is no way to send inputs, render a frame of graphics, encode it into a 720p video stream, and send it back to a user's screen, without noticeable lag. There is no magical technology they could possibly invent to compensate for this.
And while I'm not an expert on the subject, and can only make amateur speculation, I do not think that the business plan is feasible. Unless the service is exorbitantly expensive, then I just don't see how they will be able to pay for thousands of gameplay rendering boxes (all of which will require maintenance and periodic upgrades to keep up with the latest games), and all the bandwidth, and the expensive special licenses for the games. This makes no sense to me.
Three years,
tops. This is an idea so stupid, that I'm willing to rate it as on par with the Phantom on the "All-Time Most Idiotic Videogame Service Start-up Plans." We will look back and laugh about this, as yet another failed alternative-delivery-method videogame startup.
And I won't even start on the insidious underbelly of this, which is obviously yet another ploy to increase the power of the publishers over everything.