While this scenario cannot be excluded, I'm also not sure that this is the inevitable outcome of the introduction of game streaming services. I think that it's more likely that streaming remains as an added optional service on top of physical ownership/gaming, at least for the foreseeable future.

First of all, there has to be a market for powerful gaming hardware, especially graphics cards, because gaming software (i.e. the games created by game studios) relies on this hardware. If streaming services would completely eliminate physical ownership of games, then the graphics card market would plummet to the point of being barely sustainable and other hardware manufacturers would likewise suffer serious losses. This would ironically also increase the cost of streaming down the road as the hardware required, especially GPU:s, would become far more expensive and more energy-consuming if games would keep developing in complexity the way they have been for the past years. Maybe Google wouldn't care about this initially as long as it wouldn't affect their narrow business model but NVidia surely would care - and that's maybe another reason to support NVidia's GeForce Now over Google's Stadia. NVidia has a vested interest in maintaining demand for physical gaming hardware and software unlike Google.

Second, the means and forms of ownership are deep-rooted cultural notions and I don't think that physical ownership of games will disappear as long as people physically own other types of digital media such as books, music, and movies. Sure, you have movie and music streaming services but you can never convince customers to eliminate physical ownership of digital books and music because the convenience argument doesn't work there. It's simply far more convenient to physically own books and music than to stream them and we will eventually get there with movies as well given the ever greater bandwidth and download speeds. In a world where computer users physically own digital books, music, and movies, there will always be resistance against relinquishing ownership of games. GOG's business model is a perfect manifestation of that.

Third, game studios want to sell games, period. Of course, they'll happily sell streaming rights to the likes of Google and NVidia but if they can make additional money on direct sales to customers as well, on top of streaming rights revenues, then they'll equally happily take that as well (unless of course they are forced to sign exclusive deals with streaming services). So, gamers' demand for physical copies of games will also play a part in these considerations by games developers.

So, to conclude, yes, the perils of game streaming services should not be ignored in terms of implications for physical ownership of games but we're a long way away from that scenario currently. And if we want to hedge out bets then we should support a streaming service that has a vested interest in keeping physical gaming and physical game ownership alive, such as NVidia's GeForce Now service.

These are good points but to be fair, the market for streaming is largely separate from the current market of people buying graphics cards. Companies are looking towards what I can only assume they perceive as a blue ocean market. And there is also nothing stopping some sort of alternative arrangement/set of corporate agreements, or even an outright buyout (Google does have more money than NVidia, no?).


Every one of the things you mentioned has works that are exclusively available digitally. There are a multitude of "TV" shows that, right now, not in the future, right now, you CANNOT buy to own, anywhere. PC gamers at large have already showed they couldn't care less about ownership, since they made valve's Scheme a virtual monopoly over the industry. Most of them are even well aware that you can get banned from the online service and lose all the games you "own" through it, and still couldn't care less.


Nonsense...plenty of people will tell you they would rather have all their books on an e-reader instead of having giant shelves (and popular books generally have terrible resell value and are difficult to dispose of if someone no longer wants them). Same for music; most people (conditioned by conveeeeenience anti-ownership culture) would rather load some songs on their phone than insert a disc or record in and out of a player.


Explain the Scheme client and its dominance over PC gaming. GOG is a niche market. Yes, I certainly hope there is more resistance like GOG, but it is essentially a drop in the bucket at this point.

We already see that is NOT the case on GOG versus Scheme. There are games still not here despite being years, even over a decade, old. The game studios/their publishers STILL will not bring them here, even when users are openly asking for it.

Maybe I should have prefixed this part by adding that by physical ownership I mean any kind of offline product not reliant on remote cloud/streaming/DRM services. Thus I consider for instance a non-DRM EPUB/PDF ebook on an e-reader or an MP3 file on a smartphone to be as much a physical product as a physical book or a music CD/cassette, as I can take it with me anywhere I want (e.g. to a cabin in the mountains with no cell phone reception) and I can use it and reproduce it at will on my own terms. I am a big proponent of digital media as my book collection alone would require the space of a medium-sized library in paper format. My oldest MP3:s in my private collection are from 1998 and they work just as well now as when I first acquired them, even though basically everything else has changed since then - from music services to computers and music players. That's the definition of a physical product to me.

Yes, DRM is being pushed all over the place, including the digital ebook and music market, but you can get most of what you want DRM-free - or you can at least strip it off DRM yourself, as I have done with many of my books and audiobooks for instance. I'm fine with non-DRM being niche as long as it's always available as an option but I'm also aware that anything that's niche is living a precarious existence. At the same time, there will always be an underground community of hackers and crackers who will fight for the free flow and availability of information. You're right that some TV shows and series are non-downloadable and that is a concern but I'm not as pessimistic as you, yet at least. I was a very early adopter of digital media formats (ebooks, music, movies) and more than two decades later the amount of digital media is greater than ever and I can get 99% of what I want in an offline non-DRM format, even if it sometimes requires some tinkering and breaking of licences/TOS. Game streaming services will present a new challenge but it's far from a given that it will be a death sentence to game ownership as such. Yes, the concern is real but it's better to work to incorporate streaming in a sensible way in the gaming ecosystem than to fight it altogether because it's going to come in one way or another. NVidia's model seems to be a better one for those of us concerned about the implications down the road for game ownership.

Nothing to add on my part, but very well said and I wanted to thank you for the good discussion!