It's the ultimate DRM for games, you can't crack a game's copy protection if you can't see it's binaries. You can't data-mine the locations of valuables if you don't have the map data. You can't leak unreleased assets ahead of their marketing debut if you don't have a copy of the assets. You can't expose all the Easter eggs by decompiling if you don't have the code. With subscription and premium currency models those abilities can all be interpreted as lost revenue.
The markets for people buying $400 consoles vs buying a $20 HDMI stick and a $15/mo subscription are very different. After the colossal (and to me, surprising) rise of mobile gaming I think the latter might be where the real money will be 10 years from now.
They'll address the bottlenecks on the data center end. I'm pretty sure you can list a dozen problems that make it prohibitively expensive right now and for every one of them some Microsoft or NVIDIA engineer can tell you how they are working on engineering away that problem in a couple years.
Of course, it solves a lot of problems. But you have to pay for it by increasing the load on the servers by orders of magnitude. This makes it a brute force approach in my opinion.
This is of course depending on your meaning of „elegant“, but for me this would imply to solve these issues without increasing the server load so much. Let the client decide as much as possible, but check the decisions randomly and in case of suspicious player stats.
And DRM for multiplayer games should be no problem anyways? Verify the accounts or your users, but that applies to stadia like services and also the „conventional“ ones.
Solving the data mining issue is another topic and yes, giving the server more authority for things that the player should be able to see might be the only way to deal with this. But maybe the server could hand out client specific decryption keys when they are needed? That would be elegant, and not just keeping all the content server-side.
Game streaming services will find their place, but they address mainly the entry hurdle and not the issue of game state synchronization.
It's the ultimate DRM for games, you can't crack a game's copy protection if you can't see it's binaries. You can't data-mine the locations of valuables if you don't have the map data. You can't leak unreleased assets ahead of their marketing debut if you don't have a copy of the assets. You can't expose all the Easter eggs by decompiling if you don't have the code. With subscription and premium currency models those abilities can all be interpreted as lost revenue.
The markets for people buying $400 consoles vs buying a $20 HDMI stick and a $15/mo subscription are very different. After the colossal (and to me, surprising) rise of mobile gaming I think the latter might be where the real money will be 10 years from now.
They'll address the bottlenecks on the data center end. I'm pretty sure you can list a dozen problems that make it prohibitively expensive right now and for every one of them some Microsoft or NVIDIA engineer can tell you how they are working on engineering away that problem in a couple years.