In my workplace, there are preparations underway to go to a server-side network. My suspicion is that server-side software, in general, is not too far behind. As consumers, we may want to start asking some questions about how this is going to work. For example,
1) Is it going to be a one-time fee system, where you would buy a license and have permanent access to your product?
2) Is it going to be a subscription-based system, where you have to pay a monthly fee?
3) Are some companies going to offer pay-as-you go, where you connect to a company like AutoDesk to use 3DSMax for $5 or $10 per session?
4) Will we eventually be forced to buy computers that are little more than consoles?
5) Will we be able to connect just long enough to load our software, or will we have to stay online?
6) What about people who live or work in areas without high-speed internet, or without any internet at all?
7) How long will it take for somebody to figure out how to hack into the servers and steal user IDs or otherwise defeat the system?
Networks are negligible latency, your company is still run by idiots and trying to save money on hardware by paying more for the same performance, but it's at least technically feasible. Internet based computing will never work, no one wants to do their word processing with 200 ping. By the time it's reasonable, you'll pay a couple hundred bucks for a computer that fits in your hand and still runs everything in existence ten years later without any problems.
It could happen on consoles. But really my level of knowledge about the ways this could be accomplished isn't enough to make other answers much more than guesses. (That and im tired.)
1-- When was the last time you rented (or bought) a car twice to drive it straight to the scrapyard eventually anyway?
2-- I've spent 12ths of a cost 12 times in a year for worst values.
3-- Pay per view on cable TeeVee wasn't enough of a punch bag for equalizing value with privilege?
4-- No, and i'll sue the Industry for taking away my legitimate control BY choice.
5-- Both.
6-- You get what you can afford wherever & whenever already. Fiberwires connect, accessibility is a potential, infrastructures deploy where opportunity justify the means.
7-- Half a second, maybe less.
As long as consumers reject the idea, it won't take off. Companies can try whatever DRM scheme they want, but people have to buy the product for it to work. The point will come where DRM will cause a title to be a massive failure. Spore definitely lost profits over the flap.
While piracy rates won't drop, this generation of consumers knows about DRM more, and will reject it more and more.
I think the ultimate endgame is going to be reduced development costs, with a corresponding decrease in graphical quality.
Here's what really has me worried: We are not even prepared to handle the server-side networking. Most of my fellow "end users" that I have discussed this with are convinced that the network will be so slow that our productivity will suffer while we sit at our shiny new terminals and stare at little rotating hourglasses on our screens. Additionally, when a server goes down we will not be able to do anything at all.
There seems to be a serious breakdown in decision-making in large organizations these days. It does not seem to matter whether these are governments, businesses, political parties, or "other". Therefore, despite the fact that server-side anything on a massive scale is not feasible right now, I have little faith that the people in charge are not going to dive into it anyway.
Internet bandwidth is a serious problem. The big companies in charge of it aren't upgrading their networks. I should know, they've been jacking up the high speed prices in my area for the past several years as service declines. Seriously, I get dropped at least five times a day (and that's when I'm around to notice it) for periods of over one minute. There are some days I cannot play online games because I'm being dropped every 10 minutes or so.
Beyond that, such huge scale server systems are not feasible today. You can build this on a small or individual scale, I'm sure. The problem is when you have to deal with hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of users trying to access to the system. There are systems like these that exist, and they're called MMO's. The thing is, a MMO server is mostly a big database. Anything instances run by the server itself isn't unique to a single player, but shared between hundreds. You're looking at a hundred fold (at least) increase in server load to manage these people individually. MMO's already have notorious start-up and maintenance costs due to servers. Remote gaming would be a hundred times worse.
Your company is just missing a couple of logical steps.
Some airhead with insufficient tech knowledge is looking at those desktops he's paying for, thinking about how you're only using 10% of it most of the time, and he'd save a fucking fortune if you were just sharing processing time with the rest of the users.
He's missing that the processing power is more expensive at larger scales, takes more knowledge to maintain, breaks more often, breaks everyone together, and requires a massive air conditioning system with a quad backup system to maintain reliability even without hardware or software failure. The costs in power consumption for large mainframes aren't pretty, especially since you can't just turn them off when the shift ends.
He's also missing that he keeps buying those terribly expensive pieces of equipment because the minimal performance gains over the old ones were enough to justify their existence, gains more than lost by network latency alone.
I remember this game way back In the 90's. I ran my own telnet server running tradewars 2000. I would be nice to see the game running on home servers or rental servers. If I could run a server again, I would buy this game.
What your company has done is regress to the model of the 70s and 80s by having semi-dumb terminals hooked to a central server. This will always work better in conditions where the majority of the work is done on the terminal using terminal resources with little or no interaction with the server. Unfortunately, most corporate database systems don't work that way and you will indeed be limited by network speeds.
Frankly, computing power and memory are cheap enough I'm surprised that anyone would look at the old systems model, but then again companies often to stupid and silly things. I wish you the best of luck.
All online games use a variation on this system model, the only difference is the degree of centralization and dependence on network speed.
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