Inevitable, but only after Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, etc. all go under.
Not until they adapt anyways, which will be a loong time. We are talking like 5-10 years easily. Data caps have to be raised to insanely high levels or removed entirely. <snip>
What are data caps?
Rhetorical question. Suffice to say people in lots of countries won't understand your comment having grown use to inexpensive, unlimited, 4K capable internet.
Yep, and in 10-20 years local devices will have gotten cheaper, smaller, and / or far more powerful as well.
I don't see game streaming ever becoming a major segment of the market, serious gamers will always want local, less serious gamers may put up with it but the downsides (expensive internet, input lag, etc.) will always be there, and mobile gamers can already run their 'games' on today’s mobile phones, so... as an optional extra (i.e. stream-as-a-demo) it would be a nice value add to services like PSN, XBL, Steam, etc. but that’s about it.
That said I'm probably wrong, and the industry will probably push game streaming quite hard (it has lots of benefits for them after all) so I can see the likes of EA, Activision, etc. making FIFA, Madden, CoD, etc. streaming only in the future and plenty of fools falling for it and even defending it (like they do lootboxes).
Inevitable, but only after Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, etc. all go under.
Not until they adapt anyways, which will be a loong time. We are talking like 5-10 years easily. Data caps have to be raised to insanely high levels or removed entirely. <snip>
What are data caps?
Rhetorical question. Suffice to say people in lots of countries won't understand your comment having grown use to inexpensive, unlimited, 4K capable internet.
Pretty sure most countries have smart phones with internet capability (so capability to stream games) and data caps with their phone companies. Anyways, not like it matters or is relevant to the discussion. Data caps are just another giant road block that game streaming faces.
There is a lot wrong with this. For one if when someone hacks their servers well, there could be major issues alone with just that. There will be hacks on their servers because it happens even now. There is also issues if people DDOS their servers which would cause issues for all their servers. Not to mention on their end if something goes wrong your stuff could be gone as well. If their servers go down it means you can't play your games. You also have the internet factor which is bandwidth which most people have limits. A lot of countries will have a lot of issues with this.
People considering streaming games as a new upcoming thing are killing me. It used to be big in the early/mid 2000s. There were a bunch of sites with streaming games, from that MS Privateer clone to the Fall Outs, etc.
Maybe big is too generous. Obviously since no one seems to remember them. But they were around, had high quality good games, and were popular at least with me.
There may be technical issues which mean this won't be around for at least ten years, but I question the idea that serious gamers won't want this so it won't take off. We have been here before guys, F2P was not for serious gamers nor is a game as a service. Quizzical laid out the reasons why this was unlikely to be cost effective for anyone other than casual users. You do all know how the gaming industry has moved to casual play and is moving ever further in the direction of bite sized gaming?
This obsession players have with getting something for free (here you don't need good hardware) has caused a degeneration of gameplay and introduced casino like payment systems. But for streaming you will need to pay you say, sure but not for all the games. Just like F2P, streaming will end up substituting subscription for dodgy payment models.
Very true, but the industry doesn't care about "serious gamers". Mobile gaming is already the biggest money-spinner, and I don't believe that's where the "serious gamers" are.
Streaming has a multitude of benefits for the companies running it. Just look at how every large studio/publisher is trying to make players use their proprietary "portal". Advertising pays. A streaming service will have millions of eyeballs on their "portal" daily, that's big revenue potential...
Inevitable, but only after Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, etc. all go under.
Not until they adapt anyways, which will be a loong time. We are talking like 5-10 years easily. Data caps have to be raised to insanely high levels or removed entirely. <snip>
What are data caps?
Rhetorical question. Suffice to say people in lots of countries won't understand your comment having grown use to inexpensive, unlimited, 4K capable internet.
Pretty sure most countries have smart phones with internet capability (so capability to stream games) and data caps with their phone companies. Anyways, not like it matters or is relevant to the discussion. Data caps are just another giant road block that game streaming faces.
I never said anything about mobile or smart phones or phone companies. I was not talking about mobile or smart phones or phone companies.
I was talking about NO broadband data caps, high speed 4K capable, inexpensive.
Its basically a population density thing. Lots of people means companies invest expecting to be able to recover their costs. And that has been happening now for decades.
So whilst there are - are - other challenges to game streaming things like data caps and the cost of high speed broadband etc. are not those issues.
Which doesn't mean that "you" will be able to stream games. Companies are not interested in "can you stream". They are interested in "can enough people stream for us to make a profit". And - based on what Microsoft, Google etc. are saying the answer is clearly yes.
Edit: And if they go ahead and don't overcome the other technical issues then they will be looking at a financial loss.
There is a lot wrong with this. For one if when someone hacks their servers well, there could be major issues alone with just that. There will be hacks on their servers because it happens even now. There is also issues if people DDOS their servers which would cause issues for all their servers. Not to mention on their end if something goes wrong your stuff could be gone as well. If their servers go down it means you can't play your games. You also have the internet factor which is bandwidth which most people have limits. A lot of countries will have a lot of issues with this.
Maybe banks should go back to using ledgers. There could be big problems if they don't get the security right, And as you say the servers might go down.
Are there problems to be overcome? Yes. Capped bandwidth for example - maybe in some areas but its not what it was, this is "investment issue" not a "technical issue" and will be something that Microsoft, Google etc. have looked at.
As I said above Microsoft, Google etc. big picture question is not "can you access the service" but "can enough people access the service for us to make money".
Inevitable, but only after Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, etc. all go under.
Not until they adapt anyways, which will be a loong time. We are talking like 5-10 years easily. Data caps have to be raised to insanely high levels or removed entirely. <snip>
What are data caps?
Rhetorical question. Suffice to say people in lots of countries won't understand your comment having grown use to inexpensive, unlimited, 4K capable internet.
If game streaming becomes ubiquitous in the near future, the rest of the world will find out all about data caps very quickly. A model of build plenty of capacity so that you don't need to enforce data caps collapses quickly if suddenly half of your customers are using a hundred times as much bandwidth as you expected. An average cell phone user needing 1 TB per month would quickly collapse the unlimited data system. For comparison, your monitor cable likely transfers more than 1 TB per hour.
I see streaming filling several niches, all of which added together are a relatively small fraction of gaming.
1) You can offer easily accessible free trials. You want to try out a game, so the publisher offers a free trial via streaming, and the publisher pays for that, not the player. The trial is limited by content or time or something, but would be completely free to the player.
And for the player, the trial can start within a few seconds of deciding to play the game. Meanwhile, while the trial is running, the player could at any time decide to buy and download the full game. His saved game would transfer, so he could do the download in the background, then once it is done, pause to relaunch using the game executable, and pick up right where he was.
2) It's a way to play the occasional game that is only available on a different platform. Suppose that you mostly play PC games, but there's one particular game that is a PS4 exclusive that you want to play. So long as it doesn't become something that you avidly play for years, playing it via streaming would be cheaper than buying a PS4 for just that one game.
While consoles are still new, the vendors will protect their exclusives. But if a game was a PS3 exclusive, Sony isn't still trying to get you to buy a new PS3. Offering older console exclusives via streaming makes some sense.
3) It's a perfect form of day one DRM. In the future, it might become common that the sort of single-player games that would use Denuvo today will instead be available only via streaming for the first week or month or so. That would mean that people who want to play on launch day are absolutely forced to buy the game.
Because streaming is such an expensive way to run games, publishers won't want you to continue playing their game forever via streaming. Rather, after a while, they'll make it available to run locally and shut down the streaming servers.
Players would hate this approach, of course. But whether it sticks will depend on whether players put up with it or refuse to buy games until after the streaming-only period ends. If it increases day one sales by ending early piracy, expect to see it become common.
I think that part of the rush to game streaming is that if it does catch on, there's likely to be an enormous first mover advantage. Suppose that a decade from now, you play a lot of games via game streaming. There's one particular service that you use, and you've bought quite a few games on it. Another game streaming service comes along that is better in every way, except that the games you've already bought won't transfer. To switch to the other service, you'd have to re-purchase a bunch of games and start over, as you'd lose your saved games, your characters, your accounts, or whatever. Do you switch?
Companies realize that if game streaming catches on, this will happen to a huge degree. They want to be the first game streaming service that you stick with because it's where your game library is, not the one that can't get you to switch even by offering a better service for less money.
I think that there's also a considerable effect of corporate types who aren't gamers being used to thin clients in a corporate environment and not realizing that games are much harder to stream well. Thin clients can be made to work fine for high up executives who don't actually do anything demanding on a computer, so why shouldn't they work fine for everyone else?
I dunno, I think if a streaming service uses the Netflix model rather than "buying games" to add to a library it'll crush other services.
Maybe $25/mo to stream any game the service has (given that it has a substantial catalog) would be amazing.
Inevitable, but only after Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, etc. all go under.
Not until they adapt anyways, which will be a loong time. We are talking like 5-10 years easily. Data caps have to be raised to insanely high levels or removed entirely. <snip>
What are data caps?
Rhetorical question. Suffice to say people in lots of countries won't understand your comment having grown use to inexpensive, unlimited, 4K capable internet.
If game streaming becomes ubiquitous in the near future, the rest of the world will find out all about data caps very quickly. A model of build plenty of capacity so that you don't need to enforce data caps collapses quickly if suddenly half of your customers are using a hundred times as much bandwidth as you expected. An average cell phone user needing 1 TB per month would quickly collapse the unlimited data system. For comparison, your monitor cable likely transfers more than 1 TB per hour.
My comment wasn't about mobile or phones as I said above but landlines.
Now imagine if everyone in the future suddenly started streaming TV, in 4K as well, the network might collapse. Oh wait it has happened. Ditto Alexa, Google Home, Apple Home, Hue etc And the landline infrastructures has absorbed the huge increase in demand whilst delivering faster speeds at lower cost.
Yes TV is simpler to deliver than gaming. Both require downstream capacity however. And - unlike gaming - TV is now and TV is widely popular. Game "streaming" is neither widely available today or as popular as TV.
(To reiterate: yes TV is simpler to deliver.)
And network improvements continue. Where the population density makes the investment viable or in response to government targets on infrastructure providers. (And no the latter doesn't apply to the US but it is a thing in many countries especially those that have classed internet access as an essential utility.)
If - if - gaming's "other issues" are resolved (input lag etc.) then at that point we will find out whether "in the future" happens. We live in the present though. And in the present data caps in many countries are not a thing.
Inevitable, but only after Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, etc. all go under.
Not until they adapt anyways, which will be a loong time. We are talking like 5-10 years easily. Data caps have to be raised to insanely high levels or removed entirely. <snip>
What are data caps?
Rhetorical question. Suffice to say people in lots of countries won't understand your comment having grown use to inexpensive, unlimited, 4K capable internet.
Pretty sure most countries have smart phones with internet capability (so capability to stream games) and data caps with their phone companies. Anyways, not like it matters or is relevant to the discussion. Data caps are just another giant road block that game streaming faces.
I never said anything about mobile or smart phones or phone companies. I was not talking about mobile or smart phones or phone companies.
I was talking about NO broadband data caps, high speed 4K capable, inexpensive.
Its basically a population density thing. Lots of people means companies invest expecting to be able to recover their costs. And that has been happening now for decades.
So whilst there are - are - other challenges to game streaming things like data caps and the cost of high speed broadband etc. are not those issues.
Which doesn't mean that "you" will be able to stream games. Companies are not interested in "can you stream". They are interested in "can enough people stream for us to make a profit". And - based on what Microsoft, Google etc. are saying the answer is clearly yes.
Edit: And if they go ahead and don't overcome the other technical issues then they will be looking at a financial loss.
The ability to stream games on phones is a huge selling point for things like Stadia for the casual user, the target of game streaming. Hardcore gamers like us, who post on niche gaming forums, are not the target demographic. Game streaming will exist eventually, but it will co-exist with normal digital game purchases. That is the main reason I mentioned it. For game streaming to be a success, it needs to be a success in the US first; especially considering the companies investing in it right now. In the US data caps are a huge problem, as well as internet speeds and even internet availability in some extreme cases. And yes of coarse Microsoft and Google are going to claim that the answer is yes to whether or not game streaming will be a profitable endeavor. Google also said these would be profitable endeavors: https://killedbygoogle.com/ So I wouldn't put too much faith in what they claim will be a profitable endeavor. Google Stadia is dead and it isn't even out yet.
eating up your banwidth isnt really a issue in canada (ive been enjoying it for the past 18 years) since you have the option to add unlimited to your package.ive been enjoying it for the past 18 years. i hope one day soon all those states ISP's start offering it,
I think that part of the rush to game streaming is that if it does catch on, there's likely to be an enormous first mover advantage. Suppose that a decade from now, you play a lot of games via game streaming. There's one particular service that you use, and you've bought quite a few games on it. Another game streaming service comes along that is better in every way, except that the games you've already bought won't transfer. To switch to the other service, you'd have to re-purchase a bunch of games and start over, as you'd lose your saved games, your characters, your accounts, or whatever. Do you switch?
Companies realize that if game streaming catches on, this will happen to a huge degree. They want to be the first game streaming service that you stick with because it's where your game library is, not the one that can't get you to switch even by offering a better service for less money.
I think that there's also a considerable effect of corporate types who aren't gamers being used to thin clients in a corporate environment and not realizing that games are much harder to stream well. Thin clients can be made to work fine for high up executives who don't actually do anything demanding on a computer, so why shouldn't they work fine for everyone else?
I dunno, I think if a streaming service uses the Netflix model rather than "buying games" to add to a library it'll crush other services.
Maybe $25/mo to stream any game the service has (given that it has a substantial catalog) would be amazing.
And what happens to your saved games? Think that one streaming site will happily pass them on to another if they think they've got you locked in?
There probably will be sites that offer some fixed price to stream any game they have, but they won't have most of the games that you want to play. So it will be $25/month for one streaming service with 1/4 of the games you want, another $25/month for another streaming service with another 1/4 of the games you want (half of which are also on the first service), and so forth.
Inevitable, but only after Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, etc. all go under.
Not until they adapt anyways, which will be a loong time. We are talking like 5-10 years easily. Data caps have to be raised to insanely high levels or removed entirely. <snip>
What are data caps?
Rhetorical question. Suffice to say people in lots of countries won't understand your comment having grown use to inexpensive, unlimited, 4K capable internet.
If game streaming becomes ubiquitous in the near future, the rest of the world will find out all about data caps very quickly. A model of build plenty of capacity so that you don't need to enforce data caps collapses quickly if suddenly half of your customers are using a hundred times as much bandwidth as you expected. An average cell phone user needing 1 TB per month would quickly collapse the unlimited data system. For comparison, your monitor cable likely transfers more than 1 TB per hour.
My comment wasn't about mobile or phones as I said above but landlines.
Now imagine if everyone in the future suddenly started streaming TV, in 4K as well, the network might collapse. Oh wait it has happened. Ditto Alexa, Google Home, Apple Home, Hue etc And the landline infrastructures has absorbed the huge increase in demand whilst delivering faster speeds at lower cost.
Yes TV is simpler to deliver than gaming. Both require downstream capacity however. And - unlike gaming - TV is now and TV is widely popular. Game "streaming" is neither widely available today or as popular as TV.
(To reiterate: yes TV is simpler to deliver.)
And network improvements continue. Where the population density makes the investment viable or in response to government targets on infrastructure providers. (And no the latter doesn't apply to the US but it is a thing in many countries especially those that have classed internet access as an essential utility.)
If - if - gaming's "other issues" are resolved (input lag etc.) then at that point we will find out whether "in the future" happens. We live in the present though. And in the present data caps in many countries are not a thing.
You can do game streaming badly without requiring so much bandwidth to collapse the system. Doing it well is entirely another matter, however. Pre-recorded videos are readily compressible across time, and that makes things massively simpler. You only need so much bandwidth to deliver a given quality of video, and then adding more just doesn't help you.
For game streaming, you need as much bandwidth as you can get, and then some. If one service is willing use twice as much bandwidth as another, they'll be able to offer an obviously superior service, and people will want to switch to that one.
In that sense, it's going to look more like the torrent wars of the early part of the millennium, where you had a use case that could eat up arbitrarily large amounts of bandwidth. No matter how much capacity you lay out, one small chunk of your customer base will consume it all. Recall that ISPs did crack down on that and hard. And unlike Netflix or torrents, game streaming is really easy to selectively cripple just by occasionally pausing a connection for a second if it's using a ton of bandwidth.
eating up your banwidth isnt really a issue in canada (ive been enjoying it for the past 18 years) since you have the option to add unlimited to your package.ive been enjoying it for the past 18 years. i hope one day soon all those states ISP's start offering it,
For landlines in the US, it's common to have either unlimited bandwidth or data caps so high that hardly anyone needs to care about them. It's mobile where the data caps are more restrictive, precisely because it costs vastly more to deliver a given amount of bandwidth wirelessly.
I think that part of the rush to game streaming is that if it does catch on, there's likely to be an enormous first mover advantage. Suppose that a decade from now, you play a lot of games via game streaming. There's one particular service that you use, and you've bought quite a few games on it. Another game streaming service comes along that is better in every way, except that the games you've already bought won't transfer. To switch to the other service, you'd have to re-purchase a bunch of games and start over, as you'd lose your saved games, your characters, your accounts, or whatever. Do you switch?
Companies realize that if game streaming catches on, this will happen to a huge degree. They want to be the first game streaming service that you stick with because it's where your game library is, not the one that can't get you to switch even by offering a better service for less money.
I think that there's also a considerable effect of corporate types who aren't gamers being used to thin clients in a corporate environment and not realizing that games are much harder to stream well. Thin clients can be made to work fine for high up executives who don't actually do anything demanding on a computer, so why shouldn't they work fine for everyone else?
I dunno, I think if a streaming service uses the Netflix model rather than "buying games" to add to a library it'll crush other services.
Maybe $25/mo to stream any game the service has (given that it has a substantial catalog) would be amazing.
And what happens to your saved games? Think that one streaming site will happily pass them on to another if they think they've got you locked in?
There probably will be sites that offer some fixed price to stream any game they have, but they won't have most of the games that you want to play. So it will be $25/month for one streaming service with 1/4 of the games you want, another $25/month for another streaming service with another 1/4 of the games you want (half of which are also on the first service), and so forth.
That would work perfectly for me !
I typically play 1 game at a time, for a month or two, then switch to another. My favorite old games may get a revisit once a year. So even having to switch between streaming services wouldn't be much of an issue.
As for savegames, I doubt the services will keep savegames indefinitely. That would very rapidly eat up masses of storage space. There will most likely be an option to keep a savegame locally.
As for savegames, I doubt the services will keep savegames indefinitely. That would very rapidly eat up masses of storage space. There will most likely be an option to keep a savegame locally.
They will want to own your saved games if they possibly can, as that's their way to force you to return in order to their service to continue your game. With rare exceptions, the amount of space it takes to store your saved games is trivial. Spending a pro-rated $0.02 on storage for you to greatly increase the chance that you'll return and pay $25/month again is a bargain.
Furthermore, they'll try to sell them owning your saved game as offering a great service to you. Switch from one computer to another and your stuff is still there, just like your characters in an MMO, or Steam's cloud saves.
I think that part of the rush to game streaming is that if it does catch on, there's likely to be an enormous first mover advantage. Suppose that a decade from now, you play a lot of games via game streaming. There's one particular service that you use, and you've bought quite a few games on it. Another game streaming service comes along that is better in every way, except that the games you've already bought won't transfer. To switch to the other service, you'd have to re-purchase a bunch of games and start over, as you'd lose your saved games, your characters, your accounts, or whatever. Do you switch?
Companies realize that if game streaming catches on, this will happen to a huge degree. They want to be the first game streaming service that you stick with because it's where your game library is, not the one that can't get you to switch even by offering a better service for less money.
I think that there's also a considerable effect of corporate types who aren't gamers being used to thin clients in a corporate environment and not realizing that games are much harder to stream well. Thin clients can be made to work fine for high up executives who don't actually do anything demanding on a computer, so why shouldn't they work fine for everyone else?
I dunno, I think if a streaming service uses the Netflix model rather than "buying games" to add to a library it'll crush other services.
Maybe $25/mo to stream any game the service has (given that it has a substantial catalog) would be amazing.
And what happens to your saved games? Think that one streaming site will happily pass them on to another if they think they've got you locked in?
There probably will be sites that offer some fixed price to stream any game they have, but they won't have most of the games that you want to play. So it will be $25/month for one streaming service with 1/4 of the games you want, another $25/month for another streaming service with another 1/4 of the games you want (half of which are also on the first service), and so forth.
I have no doubt it'll end up fragmented just like TV/movie streaming has become. But I imagine someone will go for broke at first and do it the Netflix way.
They could do cloud saves, but game makers would also have login systems (esp if they are F2P) to maximize player retention across services. I know it's not as common for single player games, but it could become a thing with those as well.
Comments
Rhetorical question. Suffice to say people in lots of countries won't understand your comment having grown use to inexpensive, unlimited, 4K capable internet.
I don't see game streaming ever becoming a major segment of the market, serious gamers will always want local, less serious gamers may put up with it but the downsides (expensive internet, input lag, etc.) will always be there, and mobile gamers can already run their 'games' on today’s mobile phones, so... as an optional extra (i.e. stream-as-a-demo) it would be a nice value add to services like PSN, XBL, Steam, etc. but that’s about it.
That said I'm probably wrong, and the industry will probably push game streaming quite hard (it has lots of benefits for them after all) so I can see the likes of EA, Activision, etc. making FIFA, Madden, CoD, etc. streaming only in the future and plenty of fools falling for it and even defending it (like they do lootboxes).
Maybe big is too generous. Obviously since no one seems to remember them. But they were around, had high quality good games, and were popular at least with me.
This obsession players have with getting something for free (here you don't need good hardware) has caused a degeneration of gameplay and introduced casino like payment systems. But for streaming you will need to pay you say, sure but not for all the games. Just like F2P, streaming will end up substituting subscription for dodgy payment models.
Very true, but the industry doesn't care about "serious gamers". Mobile gaming is already the biggest money-spinner, and I don't believe that's where the "serious gamers" are.
Streaming has a multitude of benefits for the companies running it. Just look at how every large studio/publisher is trying to make players use their proprietary "portal". Advertising pays. A streaming service will have millions of eyeballs on their "portal" daily, that's big revenue potential...
I was not talking about mobile or smart phones or phone companies.
I was talking about NO broadband data caps, high speed 4K capable, inexpensive.
Its basically a population density thing. Lots of people means companies invest expecting to be able to recover their costs. And that has been happening now for decades.
So whilst there are - are - other challenges to game streaming things like data caps and the cost of high speed broadband etc. are not those issues.
Which doesn't mean that "you" will be able to stream games. Companies are not interested in "can you stream". They are interested in "can enough people stream for us to make a profit". And - based on what Microsoft, Google etc. are saying the answer is clearly yes.
Edit: And if they go ahead and don't overcome the other technical issues then they will be looking at a financial loss.
Are there problems to be overcome? Yes. Capped bandwidth for example - maybe in some areas but its not what it was, this is "investment issue" not a "technical issue" and will be something that Microsoft, Google etc. have looked at.
As I said above Microsoft, Google etc. big picture question is not "can you access the service" but "can enough people access the service for us to make money".
1) You can offer easily accessible free trials. You want to try out a game, so the publisher offers a free trial via streaming, and the publisher pays for that, not the player. The trial is limited by content or time or something, but would be completely free to the player.
And for the player, the trial can start within a few seconds of deciding to play the game. Meanwhile, while the trial is running, the player could at any time decide to buy and download the full game. His saved game would transfer, so he could do the download in the background, then once it is done, pause to relaunch using the game executable, and pick up right where he was.
2) It's a way to play the occasional game that is only available on a different platform. Suppose that you mostly play PC games, but there's one particular game that is a PS4 exclusive that you want to play. So long as it doesn't become something that you avidly play for years, playing it via streaming would be cheaper than buying a PS4 for just that one game.
While consoles are still new, the vendors will protect their exclusives. But if a game was a PS3 exclusive, Sony isn't still trying to get you to buy a new PS3. Offering older console exclusives via streaming makes some sense.
3) It's a perfect form of day one DRM. In the future, it might become common that the sort of single-player games that would use Denuvo today will instead be available only via streaming for the first week or month or so. That would mean that people who want to play on launch day are absolutely forced to buy the game.
Because streaming is such an expensive way to run games, publishers won't want you to continue playing their game forever via streaming. Rather, after a while, they'll make it available to run locally and shut down the streaming servers.
Players would hate this approach, of course. But whether it sticks will depend on whether players put up with it or refuse to buy games until after the streaming-only period ends. If it increases day one sales by ending early piracy, expect to see it become common.
Maybe $25/mo to stream any game the service has (given that it has a substantial catalog) would be amazing.
Now imagine if everyone in the future suddenly started streaming TV, in 4K as well, the network might collapse. Oh wait it has happened. Ditto Alexa, Google Home, Apple Home, Hue etc And the landline infrastructures has absorbed the huge increase in demand whilst delivering faster speeds at lower cost.
Yes TV is simpler to deliver than gaming. Both require downstream capacity however. And - unlike gaming - TV is now and TV is widely popular. Game "streaming" is neither widely available today or as popular as TV.
(To reiterate: yes TV is simpler to deliver.)
And network improvements continue. Where the population density makes the investment viable or in response to government targets on infrastructure providers. (And no the latter doesn't apply to the US but it is a thing in many countries especially those that have classed internet access as an essential utility.)
If - if - gaming's "other issues" are resolved (input lag etc.) then at that point we will find out whether "in the future" happens. We live in the present though. And in the present data caps in many countries are not a thing.
There probably will be sites that offer some fixed price to stream any game they have, but they won't have most of the games that you want to play. So it will be $25/month for one streaming service with 1/4 of the games you want, another $25/month for another streaming service with another 1/4 of the games you want (half of which are also on the first service), and so forth.
For game streaming, you need as much bandwidth as you can get, and then some. If one service is willing use twice as much bandwidth as another, they'll be able to offer an obviously superior service, and people will want to switch to that one.
In that sense, it's going to look more like the torrent wars of the early part of the millennium, where you had a use case that could eat up arbitrarily large amounts of bandwidth. No matter how much capacity you lay out, one small chunk of your customer base will consume it all. Recall that ISPs did crack down on that and hard. And unlike Netflix or torrents, game streaming is really easy to selectively cripple just by occasionally pausing a connection for a second if it's using a ton of bandwidth.
I typically play 1 game at a time, for a month or two, then switch to another. My favorite old games may get a revisit once a year. So even having to switch between streaming services wouldn't be much of an issue.
As for savegames, I doubt the services will keep savegames indefinitely. That would very rapidly eat up masses of storage space. There will most likely be an option to keep a savegame locally.
Furthermore, they'll try to sell them owning your saved game as offering a great service to you. Switch from one computer to another and your stuff is still there, just like your characters in an MMO, or Steam's cloud saves.
They could do cloud saves, but game makers would also have login systems (esp if they are F2P) to maximize player retention across services. I know it's not as common for single player games, but it could become a thing with those as well.