I thought that might be the direction of travel for a while but I wouldn’t give up on PCs yet. Streaming data is going to continue to grow but the relative cheapness of the require processing and storage along with the continuing limitations on end-to-end networking means on-board processing of that data is going to continue to be the best option for the foreseeable future. There’s no technical benefit (and some technical risks) with any modern take on a dumb-terminal system for general purposes.
People have already accepted the bulk of the risk happily. While more savvy tech folks realize the drawbacks of "owning" digital media, most don't. Blu-Ray and book sales are down, digital copies are up. Gaming is almost entirely digital copy now. We are entering a pretty weird reality where there is nothing written in stone. A book you read on your Kindle can now be edited after you read it. You don't technically "own" any digital media, you lease it for as long as the provide finds it economically reasonable to provide it, and then it is gone.
As for cost of processing power, it is far cheaper to lease IOPS and FLOPS from a server farm than it is to buy your own, and the reasons for that are legion. In the buisiness world it comes down to manpower. A business IT budget is roughly 20% hardware and software and 80% manpower and support. Cloud computing cuts that overhead tremendously. The business model is very similar in cost benefit analysis to ISP charges. We pay ISPs for burst speed, not continuous line speed. If you tried to buy a dedicated 100mb/s internet connection you'd quickly realize exactly how expensive the internet is. It is affordable because the ISP sells based on an assumed 3-5GB a day average, which averages to well below 100mb/s connection.
You pay for a PC that will run most games, for instance, for $1200.00, but you only use that PC when you are home, and then only for a few hours a day at most. So your investment in always available FLOP and IOP capacity is largely wasted. If you were to instead lease the FLOPs and IOPs for those 14 hours a week a service provider could charge you $8.50/month for the same capacity and still cover the 80% support markup. MANY MANY people would opt for that $8.50/month charge over investing in a new PC every 5 years... especially when a service will upgrade on the fly and handle all the normal headaches of PC ownership.
Low intensity computing will just be rolled into the cost of the software license. Microsoft is already doing this, offering an online only Office Suite at a fraction of the cost of what you'd pay to maintain a PC, let alone a Business full of PCs to support local usage.
It's just coming. There is no way to stop it. There will certainly be hold outs, at the local copy hipsters will be the future audio hipsters hording vinyl records. :2razz:
In fact, streaming gaming actually makes a LOT more sense with regard to the kind of gaming that people do today. MMOs, FPS multiplayer games and so on already depend entirely on a back end server. Many games we don't consider online only are becoming online only. You can't play Diablo III offline...
So since the company managed servers are already becoming ubiquitous in gaming, it makes a LOAD of sense to abandon the client-side computing all together. The biggest issues facing online game modeling today is the disparity in platform, and internet lag, and all of that goes away if all computing is handled on a local server. That actually frees up a HUGE burden on multiplayer gaming, and allows for a level of world modeling that is currently not obtainable in client-side computing models.
A good example: Consider a game like PUBG. In that game there are bushes, tall grass and smoke grenades that all, in theory, can be used for stealth. But in a client side computing model your ability to use those concealment depend entirely on your opponent's render settings. If they reduce grass render distance, they won't even see the grass you are trying to hide behind. Likewise smoke only renders out to a certain distance, so you can pop smoke but the guy sniping you at distance won't see the smoke. If that game is rendered entirely server side then concealment will not be draw-distance dependent, and the game maker can control how the game is presented to everyone equally... like adding a fog effect to block visuals at distances they don't want to render.
Anyway, TL;DR server side processing makes a lot of sense.
