"I really worry about everything going to the cloud... I think it's going to be horrendous."
- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak voices his concerns about the future of cloud-based services.
Wozniak is echoing the thoughts of many game players, who are reluctant to do away with games on physical media in favor of a cloud-based future that is seeming more likely by the day.
It's a common sentiment among players, but it's rare to see a high-profile, influential person in the tech space speaking out against cloud storage so directly, going as far as to say that he is expecting "a lot of horrible problems" in the next five years.
"With the cloud, you don't own anything," Wozniak says. "You already signed it away."
Do we really own anything now? I have a bunch of licenses on my bookshelf, Steam account, and mobile devices that allow me to play someone else's game.
If I could download a random car from a parallel universe to my parking lot to use daily for a flat fee a month.... Provided that someone else took care of the maintenance.
I would definitely give it a try.
Guess this isn't really the same thing, but it still sounds cool to me.
I'm concerned about cloud services too. Mostly from security. I don't put anything on the cloud that I would hate too much to see hacked and accessed.
What the cloud takes away, on top of ownership, is control. In a game context, I lose control of my game files, my save files and characters. Diablo 3 rankles me that way. *I* can't play when *their* server is down. Not even single-player.
This is coming from the guy who said "I would invest in Facebook,” Wozniak said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Sydney. “I don’t care what the opening price is"
Not exactly a guy who has his finger on the pulse...
Didn't we already use and reject this paradigm years ago i.e. main frames and dumb terminals? The "cloud" is a very useful resource, but it will never replace the power, immediacy, and control of PCs, especially with games. It's a mistake to try to define it to do that IMO.
What the hell is it with Gamasutra today, there are all these "articles" that are nothing more than a singular quite with half a paragraph of text around it. What, did you fire all your writers?
The three main consumer concerns with storing valuable data in someone's big cloud are:
1. Reliability -- can I always get to my data?
2. Security -- who else can see my data?
3. Control -- who controls access to my data?
Cloud purveyors will spend lots of money on engineering and marketing to respond to consumers on reliability and security. But they'll never cede on control. All the momentum on the part of software distributors is in the direction of cloud storage as the ultimate DRM. They're not wrong to want to be compensated for the use of the products they create, but holding user data hostage may be a step too far.
Power always centralizes. The only question is whether enough consumers are willing to object to dependency.
Maybe it is my old engineering background... or possibly the idea that "in the cloud" doesn't equate to "in my grubby little mitts", but I definately agree with Woz. Even though all the games I've made for several years have been digital, I work extra hard to make sure that games will still run on devices even after the server goes down. I realized pretty early in the login/DRM craze that we are effectively making software that will not be playable by a future generation. These "games as a service" mechanics mean that even if I keep my iPod Touch in a drawer for 20 years, I probably won't be able to pull it out and play the games... like I do on my Apple ][, Atari ST, PC, NES, Genesis, SNES, GameBoy, GameCube...
With sony having gankai and ms claiming streaming by 2015 will be the norm imagine now if a psn sized attack happened and everything fadded to black for months -no digital store and no game access for the players....when it finally came back who would still be waiting on it?!!
Now if there were data centers in each state for example then it would be harder to crash the cloud because you'd simply make the affected centers quarintined while the rest of your network hummed along.
This would be possible because servers would be designed to be cycled so no more maintanence for either psn or xbl taking the services offline as you can switch to different servers and be always doing maintenence on whichever servers were offline but joe public would never know.
As for who can see me i expect sony/ms to be like big brother and give player data :age groups,player data-what games you liked how offen you played and for how long at a time to partners which would be like new ad stream revinew for them. If you were 20something and always played sports games but someone else was 30something or in their teens and was only going for shooters raised on games like cod well
the sports companies or branches of the military would want to know or perhaps want to meet you.
Yes streaming games netflix style would be fun and clutter free however when i play my ps3 or 360 games they can't be crashed aside from power outage or rrod ylod where you can simply buy another box and keep going.
I’ve been a game developer long enough to remember people upset that when games moved from cartridge to CD that the price for games didn’t come down, with the greatly reduced cost of developers to burn a disk, in fact the price of games went up. Now here comes the cloud, where you will get even less for your money for games. No more selling your game back to a game store or popping a game on eBay to get some of your money back. The cloud is properly named, you see it one day and it’s gone the next, along with $69.95 for that next great hit game. To me this feels like nothing more than an attempt by big game publishers to stop aftermarket sales of games.
I would definitely give it a try.
Guess this isn't really the same thing, but it still sounds cool to me.
What the cloud takes away, on top of ownership, is control. In a game context, I lose control of my game files, my save files and characters. Diablo 3 rankles me that way. *I* can't play when *their* server is down. Not even single-player.
Not exactly a guy who has his finger on the pulse...
1. Reliability -- can I always get to my data?
2. Security -- who else can see my data?
3. Control -- who controls access to my data?
Cloud purveyors will spend lots of money on engineering and marketing to respond to consumers on reliability and security. But they'll never cede on control. All the momentum on the part of software distributors is in the direction of cloud storage as the ultimate DRM. They're not wrong to want to be compensated for the use of the products they create, but holding user data hostage may be a step too far.
Power always centralizes. The only question is whether enough consumers are willing to object to dependency.
https://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/marc_goodman_a_vision_of_crimes_in_the_future.html
Now if there were data centers in each state for example then it would be harder to crash the cloud because you'd simply make the affected centers quarintined while the rest of your network hummed along.
This would be possible because servers would be designed to be cycled so no more maintanence for either psn or xbl taking the services offline as you can switch to different servers and be always doing maintenence on whichever servers were offline but joe public would never know.
As for who can see me i expect sony/ms to be like big brother and give player data :age groups,player data-what games you liked how offen you played and for how long at a time to partners which would be like new ad stream revinew for them. If you were 20something and always played sports games but someone else was 30something or in their teens and was only going for shooters raised on games like cod well
the sports companies or branches of the military would want to know or perhaps want to meet you.
Yes streaming games netflix style would be fun and clutter free however when i play my ps3 or 360 games they can't be crashed aside from power outage or rrod ylod where you can simply buy another box and keep going.