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[–] [deleted] 0 points 4 points (+4|-0) ago 

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[–] poopbutt 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago  (edited ago)

Hypothetically that is a publisher's wet dream, but I don't think it will come to that.

It's like saying all games will become F2P, P2W games; The concept has been around for a while and while there are plenty of those around, most of them are stupid Facebook / mobile games for stupid people, while the vast majority of "real" games haven't adopted those mechanics yet, because the core group of customers just wouldn't adopt them. Sure some of that stuff creeps into high profile games every now and then, but the more ridiculous incarnations get called out pretty hard and the games often end up being a financial disaster for the publishers because ridiculous F2P / P2W concepts (as opposed to rather benign versions like TF2, DOTA, etc.) just don't work with certain genres (like typical high profile single player games) and competition will take care of the rest. Similarly, say, online FPS games won't ever work with streaming technology because of the inherent input lag (which you will never get rid of). Any game doing this will be a financial disaster and people will stick to the competition that doesn't force that technology.

Besides, the current digital distribution model already offers most of those benefits you mentioned but with the huge advantage of significantly reduced cost. The infrastructure cost of hosting server farms that actually play and render these games for distribution to the clients is an entirely different ballpark from hosting file servers that just offer the game's install data for transfer to the clients (and which in practice is today just a cut to Valve because Steam will take care of that anyway), so there is little for publishers to gain over the current model.