PHJF wrote on Aug 18, 2012, 21:41:
I have some shitty-ass Charter connection and Gaikai worked reasonably well with it. It would be useful as a rental service, if nothing else. It's basically the only way you COULD rent PC games.
And in the age when demos are considered a luxury, streaming is the best option of allowing people to try a game. It would be completely easy to let people play anything free for thirty minutes or so, then you can charge per day/week to rent things, and then the best system would let users outright buy and download games. If Steam had a streaming trial system I'd probably use it all the time.
I agree the on demand demos on Gaikai are nice when you just what to see what a game is like quickly. But it's so blurry and laggy I wouldn't want to seriously play a game that way.
And, PC rentals would be great, but why should streaming be the only way to accomplish it? There are plenty of DRM schemes that require an always online connection, they could make a full installable client that is only authorized to work during the rental period. That would be the
only application that could justify always online DRM in a single player game.