Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa Thinks Cloud Gaming Is "A Long Way Off"

It's already here for PC and I love it. Makes me not worry about how strong my PC is.

What's awesome is that my internet is just average but that's enough to have a cloud PC that can play any game at 60 fps at 1080p

https://shadow.tech/usen/

I wouldn't say that we should get rid of dedicated consoles but I'm all for looking into Nintendo cloud gaming. Imagine they release games where you have a cloud option to run the game with better specs.

Internet consistency remains too spotty and lag too irritating for cloud gaming to be viable. It might work-ish for a handful of people but won't be adequate for the vast majority.

And this is not an engineering problem. It's an infrastructure problem. So we're looking at years before this is even remotely on the table.

I'll be sad if cloud gaming ever becomes the only option. I like my physical gaming collection too much to give that up. That said if cloud gaming becomes really good in an x amount of years it could be good. Though needing an internet connection all the time will be very annoying.

Although cloud gaming works almost flawlessly for me and is honestly indistinguishable from dedicated hardware, I do think he's right in that I don't think it will ever replace it. It's definitely viable and is a great option for those that can take advantage though!

Dedicated hardware is way way better. Source: Stadia

@Kalmaro

What cloud gaming service do you use?

Just like with physical books, I just enjoy having the piece of hardware too much that I doubt I'll ever get into it, unless the price difference becomes a lot bigger.

While there are handful of online-only games I play and love, no way would I want to trade my dedicated hardware for games with questionable longevity (due to player participation) or the reliance on a server to keep a game running. Hell, I just bought ESP Ra.De Psi physical, despite it being much more expensive. #PhysicalMasterRace

Switch is and will remain my primary game console, because I love Nintendo games. I have no intention of purchasing another console just to play the games I want that are not on switch, which is what makes cloud gaming so interesting to me. When Stadia’s free tier launches I’ll check it out. Although I’m much more interested in Xcloud, because I don’t want to see Google take over yet another facet of life.

I agree. An Internet strong enough to do so reliably in a wide range of areas is still way off, especially wirelessly like most are doing these days.

Plus, speaking with bias, I'd prefer to actually OWN my games.

@SBandy https://shadow.tech/usen/

Hmmm, I think I'll play some games for the night!
internet has a power outage
...Never mind.

"With that said, it would be pointless to solely focus on methods of play that can only be had on dedicated hardware. Once your audience starts saying they can play on other consoles or smartphones instead, you’re finished."

Very interesting....

I'm against cloud gaming, so hopefully that doesn't happen. If I dont own it, I'm not paying for it.

@Joekun Xcloud is really great so far, I'd rate it much higher than Stadia for quite a few reasons

If a future exists where cloud gaming is the norm then Nintendo's specs will be the same as everybody else's and therefore Nintendo will be objectively the best game company, if they aren't already.

As a long time gamer, I hope no medium becomes the ONLY option. I like having multiple choices for my games - physical for collection, digital for play anytime, and cloud is nice for not having to have the latest $500-1000 hardware yet still enjoy a game in hi res. If it stays as is I’m a happy gamer.

Cloud gaming is a Hell NO for me.
Dedicated consoles and handhelds such as Wii, Wii U, Switch, PS2, PS3, PS4, NDS, 3DS, PSP, etc are my gaming devices.
No Mobile games, no PC games, no streaming games, just only consoles and handhelds for me.

Welcome to the future, where nobody owns anything.

Home ownership? Too expensive.
Car ownership? Why, when you can Uber/Lyft?
Music ownership? Get Spotify or Pandora
Movie ownership? Get one of the many streaming services.
Video games? Sure.

Not sure if I'm a huge fan of that future.

Cloud gaming only has so much storage. If the clouds are full of rain, hail or snow then there's not a lot of space left for storing games. I wonder how the people that came up with cloud gaming and how they figured out how to store games in a cloud.

@Muddy_4_Ever Bingo.

Good for you sir! Agreed, hardware all the way!

@Yosher Agreed, Having to rely on an outside force to play is not appealing. I don't mind downloading games, but streaming games is not great sounding.

Only cloud gaming I want anything to do with involves the likes of Cloud Strife, or Fox McCloud!

There have been rumors of Microsoft releasing a streaming-only Xbox Series X.

I could easily see Nintendo releasing a streaming-only Switch or Switch 2 for like $/€150 or below if they actually think cloud gaming is going to be a threat.

Though with Stadia bombing at the moment, that fear seems a long ways off.

Nintendo is always the last in everything: Online Multiplayer, DLC, Mobile Games, Open world games (BoTW), 3d shooter (Splatoon), etc. Wait till cloud turns into rain before Nintendo says "OK, OK, lets do it."

Not a surprising comment. Nintendo leadership probably still thinks online gaming is a long ways away. Lol

@Joeynator3000 Let's be fair though, most people don't have internet outages that often.

What a relief! I was afraid Nintendo would embrace cloud gaming and I certainly don't like the idea of that kind of gaming future.

@Kalmaro Eh, I encounter them every now and then...and usually internet issues in general. I just rather have the game and be able to play it without relying completely on the internet.

@NoTinderLife look at the utterly sorry state of the internet infrastructure in the USA itd take at least a decade for the government to build the infrastructure up enough for cloud gaming to be a viable true competitor to dedicated hardware. Unless something major happens the USA government will sit back and let companies like comcast do what they’ve been doing which is the bare minimum while over charging. In a lot of places the internet infrastructure is being badly taxed just from streaming services like Netflix.

I have no interest in a cloud service. I like having a console and OWNING my games. Keep subscription services to Wow etc.
And even if I did like the idea of the cloud, Internet coverage where I live, in Liverpool, UK, is abysmal. Download rates in my area are shockingly slow, still on adsl. You can barely download on a connection this bad, let alone stream a game.
I think 10 years away is a Conservative estimate for the majority in regards to a streamed gaming service. My connection on a small island when I lived in norway was 50 times better than here.

@Joeynator3000 I hear you. Luckily, the service I'm using gives you a full cloud PC. As in, it's basically just a windows 10 machine. So I just installed steam and brought my games over.

So if the internet ever went down I could just play my stuff on my regular PC.

I wouldn't mind consoles doing something similar. Let you play games locally but give you an option to play an enhanced cloud version.

I’ve been really impressed with what I’ve played of PS Now, I managed to get through the first 3 God of War games. It wasn’t entirely perfect but the input lag was minimal, a blessing in those sorta games, and being able to transfer progress between my laptop and PS4 was really handy. It won’t replace physical media just how books aren’t replaced by Kindles. I use both, depending on the situation. That’s what choice is all about.

@Ralziel Jeez, is it that bad in Liverpool? I’m just outside Glasgow and we’ve got fibre but I’m not sure if that’s devolved to our Parliament or not. It’s not like we’re that far apart, you’d think there’d be some sort of industry standard.

I think what Xbox is doing in the future is aligned with that statement, a traditional console where Xbox series x will allow players to play the game on xcloud while the game is downloading

Gaming needs gaming hardware, period. Cloud gaming is just an expansion of software for the mobile (convenience) audience. That’s it.

@Kalmaro
I don't even want better specs by cloud gaming.
It just only illusion. Fake happiness.
Gaming by consoles or handhelds are real experience.

Let’s not forget Sony told investors handheld gaming devices died their death in the wake of mobile. Well guess what, trends have a habit of moving away from all-in-one technology in favour of specialist (Switch) hardware that does what it should more precisely

@Anti-Matter I respect your opinion.

@Kalmaro why was your comment down voted? LoL @5 fanboys. It's already here on PS Now and unlike Stadia the service is awesome if your internet connection, but even more importantly, your internal home network (modern, AC, routers) can support it. Not my choice of how I game, I would still choose a dedicated machine, be it the Switch, Playstation or the PC, but it's clearly here and not in any experimental phase 😂

Good. Regardless of what some people think, the majority of us don’t have internet that is fast enough or reliable enough for cloud gaming. I have the higher end of internet available in my region and still have enough lag issues with my games that AREN’T streamed, not to mention connection drops most nights. People who want cloud gaming on their consoles can invest in things like Stadia, but I’m happy with Nintendo keeping away from it for the foreseeable future.

@NeoNeoNeo I was down voted? Oh, well whatevs.

I think it's just a case of "People fear what they don't understand."

Cloud gaming has been done successfully before, especially for PC. I think most people aren't aware of it though and then you hear about how Stadia was a massive flop and... Well the anger makes sense.

Still, cloud gaming is the future, as far as I'm concerned. I understand people not wanting to leave physical mediums but I don't see why we can't do both. Maybe have an option to play your game in the cloud if you own it already, like, you bought a Mario game and you have the option to play it in the cloud with even better settings.

Just a fun thought.

@ShadJV Yo, they took down that ring fit article, haha.

@Averagewriter
Unlike HDTVs, cloud gaming services have not exploded in popularity.

PS Now is has been gaining momentum thanks to a price reduction but it's still incredibly niche (PSVR has a considerably larger install base than PS Now), and the less said about Google Stadia, the better. XCloud should be the first "successful" streaming service in comparison, but there is nothing to indicate that it will "explode in popularity" anytime soon, if ever.

im Really impressed with what Microsoft has done with Xcloud... and it’s only a beta

It is not 10 years away. That people will care is another thing.

The big corporations may want to entirely move to cloud gaming and build their massive, hungry data centers and sell you convenience like nothing else ever existed, but there will be those who will resist, wanting to preserve the integrity of local, offline gameplay processing, and that’s where the rest of us will go to play a game that responds to the press of a button EVERY time

@PBandSmelly So true and I'm glad Nintendo has the right idea

@Kalmaro isn't that a bit lazy on the making tech better?
Might as well hook players to whatever Super cgi computers Pixer uses, rather then making a pretty powerful handheld device with good battery or just a powerful home console

as others said once the internet crashes or you can't get a good connection gaming is off, not to mention the data bill your get or owning your games, once your account is down or the publisher loses the rights to a game good luck trying to get it back

what kind of future is this? where powerful hardware isn't getting smaller/portable or put into new consoles and we have to steam/rent games off the net?

Microsoft have the best streaming now perhaps, but they said before xmas that it still can't replace hardware. It's not good enough.
So thats kinda what Nintendo boss means too.

He's right. Latency issues outside of urban centers make the majority of populations beyond existing cloud gaming solutions.

Glad Nintendo must be working on what comes next by the sounds of it.

@nessisonett It's insane bad in my area. There's no fibre in a good deal of the streets around where I live. For such a well populated area it's pretty pathetic.

Sorry, but I enjoy owning my games, and not having someone else decide when I am done with them.

On top of that, the majority of people cannot get Netflix to stream at a decent definition consistently, what makes one reliant that consoles, with their current power pissing contest, ever going to replicate a native experience flawlessly?

A. Physical game
B. Digital game
C. Cloud game

I choose A and B.

Coming from the President of a company who hasn't figured out how you code a steady P2P connection.
I mean Sony and Microsoft did it last decade but I'm sure we'll be able to play a Nintendo game online sometime in 2030...

The sad part is I wish I wrote that sarcastically but it's the truth.

My internet connection is not good enough for cloud gaming at my house, let alone spotty data on the go. No matter how much Internet speeds improve in more populated areas, ISPs have no incentive in providing fast internet or data coverage to rural areas. Since such regions can therefore not reliably use cloud gaming, it would be quite a shame if the entire industry chose to go in that direction.

@Ventilator @redd214

xCloud from Microsoft is still only in Beta. It still has some input lag, and runs only in 720p on Android phones.

Eventually Microsoft will get there, but right now, in it's current state, it is technology behind Stadia.

Claiming something else, is simply untrue! And I am only talking about the technical performance, and not the business model of the two services.

Stadia is under the right conditions without any noticeable input lag, and some games can run in 4K/60fps. That is miles ahead of xCloud in it's current state.

When I play on Stadia, I can't tell that I am not playing on a physical console. It's that good under the right internet conditions. It's here and ready now for people with good connections.

Google under delivered on their promise of all their games running in 4K/60fps. Only a few games are. But it's still very impressive what they have achieved, and it simply the best performing game streaming service at the moment.

xCloud could get there also, but just isn't yet. Stop fooling yourselves and others. Even if you all hate Google and Stadia.

Some games are just about viable now, with a consistently excellent connection; but you try and play Thumper, even with a wired Steam Link... it's impossible.

Internet just isn't robust enough now to fully support cloud gaming but I'd imagine that within the next 8 to 10 years that will not be the case anymore.

Now the head honcho at Nintendo back in 2001 said "online multiplayer gaming will never catch on" - then 3 years later Nintendo are in 3rd place.

Here's the myth that they don't tell you.

1. ISP subscription to have internet
2. ISP gives you the package price not you choosing the package price.
3. You pay to buy the Streaming games - NOT FREE
4. Streaming requires you also pay them Subscription fees
5. Crapoola internet speeds along with ISP Throttling if exceeded data
6. Internet outage what then???

Cloud Myths.
0. You give up all rights to the data whether you agree to the TOS or not - once you upload
1. They own your data
2. They can sell your data
3. You have no rights whom can see your data
4. If hacked they have no obligation to tell your data was stolen
5. Too Many Backup server farms so deleted one place means it's still in another location.
6. Cloud allows data mining even if they say no what proof do you have they don't and haven't done so already.
7. Cloud has latency issues there is no way around this FACT.
8. Cloud downtime or DDOS - now what....

So Tell me again people with these issues whom do you think Interests they are protecting. Don't get me started on Stadia and how it seemingly glosses over and fails to inform people you get data Caps from your ISP. Also you have to buy their Controller hardware and Chrome device to work on TV along with paying subscriptions to use it. Hardware Fiber connections is the way to go but even that isn't cheap and not for every locations and WiFi is only good as the WiFi provider ISP gives or what they can afford. Never-mind Mobile data use that and you will get a drumming that you will never forget and neither will your Funds. So with all this talk of Cloud(Server Farms) this is all just PROPAGANDA thinly disguised to fool the uneducated or closed minded user to not ask themselves whom are they really kidding. If we really wants in NA unlimited Internet Speeds keep on dreaming that isn't going to happen until the FCC(pathetic right now) gets off it's fat bunghole and force change. And make Fiber to ever inch of NA then and then only can we talk about Cloud/Streaming/Gaming Online at affordable price and consumers can pick and choose which and what they want for their Internet. Also Cloud storage isn't free that is why they sell your data to keep the storage as I mentioned in the Cloud Myth but most don't even think about this Fact.

@Kalmaro If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that “the future” is fickle and subject to change. 3D TV and Google Glass failed - so did OnLive, a cloud gaming service very much like we're discussing. In the end the customer will decide if the technology is worth it.

@Coolie
In the USA perhaps, were the free private market is above anything else. Yeah, you are screwed with you greedy ISP's.

But in more regulated northern Europe, where we dare to take in the best parts of socialism and mix it with capitalism, government's are financially supporting ISP's to get high performing fiber connections to rural areas. And it happens.

Because a good internet infrastructure across the country, is important for all citizens, and it's helps businesses and general growth in rural areas.

But in America your government are still afraid of such socialist concepts. So it will probably never happen.

@dres lol calm down bud. I'm not fooling anyone and am aware of the pros and cons of both as I've used them quite extremely last couple months. Yes, strictly from a technical standpoint Stadia is ahead but in many other ways Xcloud is better even at this point. Games selection, achievements, controller options, confidence of knowing that I won't be abandoned in a couple years, as well as others. Personally there was input lag initially when I tried xcloud but haven't noticed it at all recently. Looking at what both offer at this point in time I personally would recommend X over Stadia. In addition naming conventions aside, realistically speaking one would be hard pressed not to call Stadia in its current form a beta as well with so many missing features.

And I'm replying from my Pixel phone so no, I don't hate Google

@ClassSonicSatAm I don't think you've been grasping what I've been saying completely.

The cloud service I use for PC gives you a fully functioning computer, it's just on the cloud. So you still have to buy your own games, get your own software, etc.

That's something I like, so what I think could work is that we have a system set up where you can buy a game, perhaps a physical copy or a digital one. Then, you the option to either play on your dedicated system (let's say your Switch) or play the game on the cloud to play a higher spec version.

So no one is losing anything. Nintendo could still be focusing on hardware while giving people the 𝙊𝙋𝙏𝙄𝙊𝙉 to choose to use a cloud based system to play their games as well.

Also, cloud gaming takes little data, you're just streaming a video. It's no different from watching YouTube. You don't need that good of a connection. Just something stable.

Assassin's creed Odyssey is region locked on switch... From that perspective alone cloud gaming can rightly piss off on a Nintendo based console

Stradia works nice and smoothly off my home broadband connection and no region locking, long may that continue

I hate cloud gaming

@ChompyMage Do you hate gaming on the cloud or just how cloud gaming has been implemented by products like Stadia?

Based on nintendo’s online efforts.... they should stick with dedicated hardware.

I can’t speak for everyone but in the U.S. internet is not the best. Lack of competition with internet service providers results in underwhelming internet service.

@bert0503 I'm using spectrum where I'm at and it's been working pretty well. I can't speak for everyone, though.

The day that cloud gaming becomes the only option (if that happens) is the day i stop buying new hardware and stick with older devices

Cloud gaming? No thanks, we are ruining the climate enough as it is. Don't need to ruin it more with 5G network bands everywhere.

Very sensible and level-headed take here. Cloud gaming is definitely not ready now, the Stadia proved that. But maybe with improvements in technology, it can work. They should definitely prefer to stick with traditional physical media, but they're keeping their options open in case they're forced to move in this direction.

@NoTinderLife Yet they were the first of the Big 3 to develop the modern controller layout, analog sticks, rumble, open world games (Mario 64, Ocarina of Time), motion controls, expanding the market to causal and non-gamers while still producing great content for hardcore gamers, backwards compatibility, portable gaming, etc. They were however the last to embrace microtransactions, lootboxes, paying for online (even though it’s only p2p), and cloud gaming. Seems like a pretty good position IMO.

@TAndvig 5G is messing with the climate?

@Bolt_Strike Cloud gaming is already here and it works fine, stadia just messed it up royally.

@Kalmaro
Cloud gaming works for some people, but doesn't work well for most people on this planet.
Even if you have a generally good internet connection, that doesn't mean that cloud gaming will work well for you.
Heck it is enough if you just happen to sit to far away from the next server. The input lag will already be a big disadvantage as well. Even in an ideal scenario you will have input lag, if you are very receptive to that kind of thing than this might literally never work.

Of course if everything in your place is perfect for this than, then cloud gaming might work very well for you and that is great for you, but it doesn't help all the people who are bound to have problems.

Besides that, you are talking about Shadow, which is, as you have described yourself, very different than other cloud services.
I can live with Shadow, as it really just lets you outsource your hardware. Nothing wrong with that, if it works.
But looking around, seeing the development of other cloud services clearly shows, that this is not what the industry tries to push us to.
And that is what annoys the most: The industry tries to push us gamers to a kind of service that would mainly be an advantage for them, but not for us.

@dres In some comparison recently on YouTube, XCloud had less lag.
It all depends where server is vs where you live.
I have fiber line, and NVIDIA game streaming works great on that.

Anyways. I'm paying for YouTube Premium permanently, so i don't hate Google.
Google have a much better deal than Spotify for the same price.

@Kirgo Shadow and cloud gaming in general are the same thing though. You're sending your inputs and they are sending you a video of what's going on. I can say from experience with shadow that they managed to get input lag so low that it's fighting game viable. That's pretty exciting stuff right there.

I'd even say that it would totally work for most people who have stable internet, but we just haven't had a chance for most people to give it a shot.

The industry will always try to put themselves in an advantageous situation. If they didn't, they wouldn't make a profit. The only way to make money while being at a disadvantage is if you're a charity.

No to cloud gaming, making download only games is bad enough. I like to OWN my games, not rent them and be held hostage hoping the server doesn’t go down

@Bunkerneath That's why I've been suggesting they do something like let you have an option to play the game in the cloud if you already own the game. Whether you have it physically or digitally.

So it's just an option for people who want to play the game at better specs. Best of both worlds.

@Kalmaro As it stands now, from a general point of view, and a worldwide perspective, you'd have to replace "at better specs" with "without the need for dedicated hardware", because right now, that's the only REAL benefit, depending on how you feel about relinquishing ownership of your games to the whims and fickle nature of game publishers and/or video gaming companies.

Cloud infrastructure is nowhere NEAR what it should be in major parts of the world, even in first world countries, so while some may benefit, others will still need to wait decades for the infrastructure in their specific area to be up to the same standards.

Case in point: I live in Amsterdam, where the internet is great, and I can stream and download whatever I want within a matter of moments, but only half an hour's travel away, in a small village, where my father lives, the reception is far, FAR worse.

Wifi is highly variable over there, and phone services too. When using my smart phone, I have to LITERALLY stand near or lean into the window sill at the front of his house, to get full bars for reception. If I walk to the back, you immediately see bars dropping off. He has interactive TV and internet, but he has far more problems than I've ever had. There's talk of the area being upgraded to fiber glass, but that's still several years away, to say the least.

So, just imagine living there, and trying to achieve lag free gaming sessions with any of the three (or four, counting Steam) main services available...

And that's just one tiny example of the many available all around the world, regardless of whether it's in a developed part of the world or not.

@Kalmaro Oh, and yes, 5G messes with the climate and the environment. It takes better/more powerful masts, and bigger data centers to provide for it, which means more CO² so more pollution. And not to mention that it's still not 100% sure what the radiation does to the environment long term.

And I'm not talking about conspiracy theorists claiming it will cause bubbles in your brain, but it IS radiation nonetheless, and we're all walking around/living in it 24/7.

@ThanosReXXX Well that's why I suggested locking it behind a purchase to a physical or digital copy of the game. So the cloud option is just an option of you want it but not the main focus. Like, say, how the Switch can be docked for more "power" but you don't have to do so to enjoy what you've got.

I'm not suggesting we just go straight to cloud and drop everything else.

Aa for climate stuff, I have many opinions on that and none of them fit here so I won't touch it. I'm curious about radiation and the weather but that's a bit off topic, I guess.

@Kalmaro I hate everything about it

@ChompyMage I'm very sorry to hear that.

@Kalmaro Yeah, good point, we'd better stay away from THAT discussion. That's almost giving me a bigger headache than the climate itself...

As for cloud gaming, my point was that it is NOT a superior option, so you saying that it's an option for playing games "at better specs" isn't correct, and the rest of my comment was to emphasize that this is an actual reality for large parts of the world, even in first world countries.

But having said that, I'd be okay with it remaining an option, much like how we now already have several of these services, but once it becomes the only way to play games, then I'm out and will spend the rest of my life working through my physical back log and/or replaying my old games.

@ThanosReXXX Well if you can play the cloud version of your game at better specs than the original, I'd argue that's a better version.

Still, I'm just arguing for the option to have it, rather than a complete replacement of all physical mediums.

Internet data where I live is still FAR too expensive. I do not even stream TV (don’t have Netflix, Stan, Disney+ etc.) and still run out of data each month. There is no way I can afford more data (or unlimited data), already paying an arm and a leg for it as it is. Everyone seems to think that online / streaming is the way of the future. No, at the moment, it is not for some of us unfortunately. That is not to even mention the poor reception you can still receive in certain areas.

@Nintendzoey That's really unfortunate. I think cloud gaming is amazing but there's no getting around that not everyone is in a position to enjoy it just yet.

I know here in the US, having no competition between ISPs is hurting us.

Cloud/streaming gaming can work perfectly alongside dedicated hardware.
Digital gaming replaced physical copies for better or worse, the tradeoff there was having an actuall collection or convenience and people chose the latter.
Streaming gaming is too dependant on being online, the whims of the publishers etc. as we already see with digital distribition some games you thought were available just vanish from stores without much fanfare.

@Nintendzoey oh wait, didn't know you had an option for unlimited data. So money is the biggest hurdle then?

@Kalmaro My brother-in-law told me that he has unlimited data. They are with a different provider than me though. Whenever I go to stay with my sister and him, he always tells me that I can use as much as I like. So I always download the big games to my Switch when I go to see them. The provider that I am with though (a cheaper data company - one that I personally can actually afford) does not have an unlimited data option. I have researched all of the providers in my area though, this is the one that provides the best affordability for someone in my price range.

@Kalmaro Okay, no offense, but you're STILL missing my point: the cloud version is NOT the better version of a game. At least not for quite a few people who aren't in a favorable area, where internet bandwidth is concerned, so these people are FAR better off with a local and/or physical version of a game, and THAT was my point.

Hence also my personal example, which perfectly illustrates that. Unfortunately, people often just don't take a moment to consider that just because THEY have a decent or even great connection, that it may not be a country wide phenomenon.

People still being amazed by that simple fact also really surprise (and disappoint) me...

Until the equality is there in that respect, in most parts of the world, or across the board in the target areas that matter, then cloud gaming will always be a secondary, or even tertiary option, after physical and digital.

@ThanosReXXX I think we're getting mixed up on what I meant by better. I simply meant that the cloud version could be running the game at higher specs than what the hardware may be capable of, thus, making it the "better" version.

I didn't mean that it would be the best version necessarily for all people, which is why I suggested that it come along with physical or digital purchases of them game. That way, you have options to play it offline on your console or play a version with better specs if you so choose.

@Nintendzoey Man, that stinks. We were using ATT for a while at my old place for internet and it was less than ideal so I feel your pain.

Eat this, Reggie.

Cloud based gaming would be the ultimate virtual machine, but it would also take the personal out of Personal Computing.

Unless, of course, we're only talking dedicated streaming, from one privately owned device to another, like @Kalmaro talks about in the first comment. In such a case, you'd only have yourself to blame for any latency, and the pricing issue wouldn't even exist.

But, I'd be careful with calling private hosting "cloud based". In all likelihood, Furukawa is strictly talking about services like Stadia and, ten years ago, OnLive and Gaikai.

For those types of services, I'm with the prez. Won't be worthwhile for a while.

@Kalmaro So, were talking potentially here, which is a BIG if, and which isn't exactly the best selling point either.

You see, you also need to take into account the incentive for people to migrate over to or get excited about using services like Stadia, when right now they actually CAN have superior graphics, either on their high end gaming PC, or on console with either of the two premium models of Microsoft and Sony's consoles. That's real world, and that is the same across the board for all owners, as previously mentioned, so it's a solid value. High end cloud gaming isn't. Well, not yet anyway.

If you would have made that a bit clearer right from the start, we wouldn't have had to spend so much text on it...

I just see these comments as way Nintendo can 'rubbish' the competition without looking too bad when doing it.

I must ask you all here to stop putting any money into cloud gaming. please!!!!
Apart from availability I only see one winner with cloud gaming, and it is not the consumer, not for one minute. You are just helping to create a more profitable market place for the companies.

@ThanosReXXX But I thought I made it clear on my first post.

You'd have the physical or digital copy of the game on your console and have the cloud as an option.

I think cloud gaming can even be a selling point for PC players like if you can't reach your dedicated PC or you don't have the money for a gaming rig so you by something cheap and just stream your content.

Like for the service I'm using. You can just by a cheap laptop or something, then get a subscription to a PC and you're gaming on amazing specs for a fraction of the cost of buying a physical gaming rig. Your only caveat being that you need a stable connection.

Nintendo is on the ball, I hear its heard about this new fangled thing call the InterWedNet or something and is just waiting for it to take off before embracing it....

On a more serious note, Even as someone with super reliable 170Mbps internet access with major data centres 5ms from my line, I have very little to no interest in streaming. I did get the x-cloud mobile beta invite and it was good to see tomb raider playing on my phone perfectly but the novelty did not last longer than a few hours when I went right back to the switch as my main place to play.

@westman98 Digital-only (discless) Series X is the rumor. There was, long ago, a streaming-only rumor which never made any sense. The whole selling point of streaming is that you don't need a console...

@Kalmaro Yes, the signals from 5G is so strong that it interferes and confuses bees, whales and etc. Why else do you think we are seeing such a high amount of beached wales and the decline of bees? x) Look around, theese G network bands are completely messing up our nature. No one takes this serious though but they should. There was even a gathering of a thoussand scientists trying to convince the UN of the problem. But no one listens. Which is the problem when you are trying to argue with capitalists that their private interests is killing our planet.

@Kalmaro That shadow thing is interesting. For today. But I'd be very wary of a newish startup basically trying to undercut Amazon for $35.00/mo. They're doing little more than selling a gaming oriented EC2 competitor for a lot less money.... that doesn't sound terribly financially viable once the unicorn money runs out, and isn't really a competitor in the "game streaming" space.

@NEStalgia Well see what happens in the future. Fortunately, you can cancel any time and they have cheaper price points coming along to so I'm pretty excited.

@TAndvig First I've heard about it. I've heard there were issues with 5G but never what was wrong specifically

@TAndvig I've come to to the realization that capitalism and communism eventually become the same system, they simply take different paths to get to the same point. In the end, a small handful control most aspects of society and development and proceed to engineer the world as they desire it, simply because they can. The "capitalists" would proceed down this path for "commercial" success, investor return, demonstration of the forward-thinking of its leadership, and higher personal status. The "communists" would proceed down this path to prove State commitment to it's plans of development, economic efficiency, demonstration of the forward-thinking of it's leadership, and higher personal status.

In both cases, a privileged few for whom the power and status goes to their heads and they start to accept that they are simply superior to the majority of people and thus know best, plus benefit from the personal gain of doing things, make the whole of society a miserable place so they can fulfill their ambitions of superiority and play games with their internal power struggles among their own social tier.

Same system, different paths. It's the same misery, and the same consolidation of all to a small subset of the most efficient choices into the hands of a few.

Maybe 5G will create such calamity it will finally lead to the end of the cell phone. That would be nice. The cell phone managed to break society on a level even atomic weaponry failed to achieve.

@Kalmaro While I know nothing about their business model, I think we can safely say coloc leasing of cloud servers isn't cheap, and doing so with dedicated hardware is even less cheap. Undercutting Amazon would be a pretty tricky business...so what tricks are they using to make that not an instant trip to banrkuptcy? I assume the longer term intention is, like ISPs have always done (and especially in the dialup days) overselling capacity with the assumption that only X% of VMs will ever be in simultaneous use. Nobody can lease a dedicated server for $35/mo and stay in business.

@NEStalgia No clue! I'm taking advantage of it while I can though.

As for capitalism, I agree that it can get out of hand but I'd say any system could.

Not in the US. All the "big competitors" carved it into fiefdoms so they can be as dodgy as they want at exorbitant cost. And it's going to stay that way until the country takes a page from other nations that recognize internet access should be considered a utility with required standards of quality.

@Kalmaro That part I got, about the options. But the thing is, that Google wants to entice owners of the current systems from Microsoft and Sony to choose Stadia over the new Xbox or PlayStation, but both service-wise and content-wise, they're a FAR inferior product, so while it shows some promise, they're a LONG way off from truly being able to compete with these two, if ever at all.

Just having a large name behind the service isn't enough to cut it, especially in a business where the reputations and services of all the known parties are pretty much carved in stone.

@Rect_Pola I wouldn't think too far into "required standards of quality" with US utilities. Even ignoring the other utilities and the quality of "regulation", there's Verizon - where the copper phones have been down more than up for the past 6 years. They tell you the problem is on your end (then the next guy fixes it on their end.) Then it breaks again. Meanwhile they've had secret internal memos for a year or two called "Fiber is the Only Fix", where they were instructed specifically to not fix the copper system. And then in areas where fiber was their only offering and they didn't maintain the copper properly, they cherry picked only the wealthier areas to get fiber service, lefter poorer areas unserved, or simply told people there won't be service, so they'll extend cell phone service at a discount, but you'll still be on metered cellular internet through your phone.

That was the regulated utility part of telecom. Don't expect much from any government protection of internet as a utility. "Down 8 months a year with noisy lines" counts as government regulation of a telecom utility for guaranteed service here. If any politician campaigns with regulating internet service as a necessary utility, know that that means setting up a bureaucracy, a mandatory charity program/tax for giving service to designated protected classes, and adding a few other taxes to maintain the bureaucracy, and then continuing to rubber stamp the status quo as drafted by the telecoms. Comcast can draft how they want to be regulated and submit it, along with their 600 page draft of the systems they'll put in place and the new facilities they'll build to maintain regulation documentation.

Meanwhile Billy Bob in Mobile still gets 900Kbps internet for $100/mo and 200GB limits that's down half the time.

@ThanosReXXX It still blows my mind how bad Google messed up stadia. That's also an example of what I don't want.

Like, shadow pc I like because you're just getting a PC, you still own all your games and whatnot, it's the PC you don't technically own.

Stadia makes you have to repurchase everything and that's a big nope from me. If they could have worked a deal with steam maybe amd let you carry stuff over, that may have helped.

@Kalmaro Yeah, at this point, I'm truly starting to wonder how many millions and time they're going to pump into it, before scrapping it, like pretty much all their other revolutionary inventions.

May very well end up on the pile right next to Google Glass...

@Kalmaro Because no one cares enough, it was shrugged off around the early 2000's as a false theory. Even though that not that long ago scientists talked about the dangers of 5G. The fact is, animals are dying because of this and it's so provoking that no one in the da** gaming industry bothers to even talk or cover the subject.

@NEStalgia Say what you will about communism. But I would trust communism and a communist state way more in it's action than one solely motivated by personal profit. Also we haven't ever had a communist state so I am not sure what you're basing your theory on how it would act and react.

@GrandScribe Not just the sad state of the internet structure. Our entire electrical grid. One well-placed EMP and it's bye-bye power grid. Although the loss of gaming would be the least of our concerns if that were to happen.

@TAndvig The two systems are much more similar than different overall by their later phases, as I said. What does that tell us? That the design of the system is generally irrelevant. Human nature becomes the system eventually and all the "systems" designed merely define how it starts, not how it ends, and human nature is inherently to serve ones own interests above all others. Mix that nature with assigning power, either by fiat in a Communism, or by market success in a free market society, and you get the same end result.

Both systems are effectively the honor system. A theoretical free market ("capitalism" which isn't an actual system) depends on people choosing to honor fair competitive practices, charging fair prices for profit over cost, etc, so that goods and services are distributed within the means of a populace. But what has it descended into? "Charge the maximum amount the market will sustain" and "maximize investor return." All activity exists to serve the handful that bankroll society, merely with the hope that here and there there will be some scraps within the inefficiencies to make pieces of the system work as hoped. Which does hold true, but is happening less and less as technology and efficiency have led to immense consolidation. A mercantilist Politiburo of sorts.

A theoretical communism depends on a large appointed governmental/oversight body to effectively be saintly in distributing the produce of society among its populace, always with the best interest of society in mind.

In terms of the honor system with respect to human nature, that's the system more ripe for failure, even though both are, because everything is entrusted to the goodwill of man, and worse, those assigned to power positions. From the start we know that's a bad start. If man were all angels it would be a lovely system. As an on-paper theory, it assumes that the rich are greedy and the poor are ethical, and turning power to them will build a better society. In reality the poor just want to become the rich and wield the power that was once wielded over them. It starts as a system of revenge, and then becomes the same old bureaucracy of good old boys a "capitalism" does. Human nature won't allow it to be anything else. Instead of a collection of corporations the state itself behaves like a single many department monopoly corporation.

The "we haven't had a communist state" argument is an old standby argument for a long, long time by those who still support the theories, but it only serves the core problem. We have had one. We've had many. All were disasters. Not because they weren't "real" Communisms, but because they were....the theory itself is just that, a theory based on an ideal, based on an academic pondering what a better system might be and how it would work, based on (accurate) assessment of problems with the current (free market and aristocratic) models, not the real world where it mixes with real human nature. The communisms that don't look much like the theory text is what happens when you try to apply that idealist theory to the reality of human nature....it's not pretty. It's designed for the abuse of the selfish and greedy to have overwhelming reach right at the start. Hoping for a pure-of-heart administrator(s) for it is little different than hoping for a benevolent monarch. When it works, it works wonderfully! But it's not much of a system to hope for a benevolent ruler, let alone an entire benevolent bureaucracy.

But the other half of the lie is that free market "capitalism" is a superior foil. I think we're starting to learn that it's simply a some netting in the way to slow down the full force of human nature and inherent consolidation of power and wealth. It's a bit more effective a speed bump than Communism is, but ultimately it fails as completely over a somewhat long period of time.

I think it's oft misunderstood by people who still support the idea of Communism that people "reject the idea of Communism." Other than the monied elites, I don't think many people actually reject the idea of it. The idea is quite lovely as a pure theory, it would be hard for anyone to dislike the idea. Instead it's a realization that the idea doesn't really interact with reality at all, it's kind of a fairy tale that might work in a perfect universe where everyone only had the best intentions, but that's not our universe, and as a result, it's a design where the avenues of total corruption are baked right in at the start, and are all but guaranteed to be exploited at the start. The dream that "one day it could really work!" persists, because it sounds like such a desirable dream, but doing so ignores the reality of any human involvement in anything. Roadblocks to prevent power consolidation and wealth concentration are all we really have to go on. Keep the ambitious tangled up in their ambition as long as possible. That system, on the other hand, starts by consolidating power, and concentrating the wealth as step 1 under the hope that with a big enough bureaucracy humans would choose to do the right thing with it. The theory made sense. We tried it. Numerous times. And most learned that the result is guaranteed to be bad, the theory can't be salvaged.

The reason it usually turns into an authoritarian police state is also the inherent nature of it. It only works if everyone buys in. As long as someone says "no" they either must be forced or coerced to say "yes", or be exiled or disposed of. All 4 of which are staples of attempts to implement it. A few people can be simply imprisoned as law breakers. But large swath of population saying "no" must be dealt with on a scale of institutional force.

The real lesson is, humans, collectively, don't have very much honor, and any honor system isn't going to work long term, while all the current social/economic theories are rooted in an honor system. The question that arises then is not "how do we design a perfect system" but, rather, do we simply need to rely on cycles of destruction and reconstruction to keep it balanced, but cyclical? The existing ideas all don't actually work for a long term period of time.

The Enlightenment Age founders of the US thought they had sorted it out and put sufficient systems in place, but, we see human nature pretty quickly found ways of defeating those, too. We can't trust societies to humans. And we can't trust societies to algorithms and machines that are the designs of humans serving the same ends. And religion that used to keep societies regulated via different routes has largely vanished in much of the world, and is also often corrupted. So we're back to an empty drawing board.

I see both systems being capable of functioning on the small scale with much less opportunity for corruption. Size/scale is the ultimate corruptor. If the size of the body politic were quite small I think both systems would be similarly effective and good natured. But how do we get back to small groups of people occupying small nation-states or even city-states short of a mass extinction event or WWIII?

To more directly respond to your question, though, a Communist state would be no less profit motive oriented than a free market corporation. For that matter, the US push into 5G is a direct reaction to Communist China's push into 5G, and tooling the future of their city planning around it. And while I know that will yield the "but China's not a true Communist state anymore!" response, I can say, only: Try asking them that. They're quite convinced they're a Communist state, and that Communism is a superior system. A 19th century academic theory book doesn't define what's a real implementation of the theory applied to a dynamic world or not. Time does. If the time-weathered implementation of Communism happens to look a whole lot like a free market economy...well...that was my whole point, and the "do it faster than we know what its effects are" push in the US and subsequently Europe, is a direct response to the market pressure China would create if they implemented it first and their standard became the standard.

Communism, Capitalism, 5G. The only meaningful difference I'm seeing here is the shade of the color red.

@NEStalgia Communism is universally hated because it's responsible for the death of millions.

Capitalism, while not perfect, is responsible for lifting more people out of poverty than any other system.

5G being because of China, I'll have to look into that.

@Kalmaro Sure, and I touched on that in my textwall above, but I think that still focuses on too narrow an issue, some of it being circumstantial (i.e. in the most infamous historical cases, the timing of the rise of the political movement was coupled to existing ethnic and geopolitical tensions, and the death counts "due to communism" really aren't, it was a confluence of events (and pure incompetence), and while, yes, it was a "necessary" part of the movement, it's also a mix of conditions that were particular to the times and locations involved as well. Meanwhile, a lot of capitalism's "lifting people out of poverty" (fairly rhetorical) go back over a century with tons of proprietorships and post-war booms and don't relate well to the modern vertical consolidated publicly traded corporatocracy where the "final evolutions" so to speak of both systems mostly congeal into one infected mass.

Yes, Communism has objectively verified as being a much more rapidly disastrous system, but I think zeroing in on historical cases, be it the police state death tolls of the former or the shared prosperity of the latter really tell the story of the present and future, where both clearly become much more like each other - capitalism, though it's public trade mostly among banks and funds, and endless vertical consolidation form an economy that is nearly indistinguishable from the state-run centrally planned business of a communist state - meanwhile the real communist states adopt ever more mercantilist policy toward commerce, mimicking that same corporatocracy.

Or put another way, 21st century capitalism doesn't look much like 19th century capitalism, and 21st century communism doesn't look much like 19th or 20th century communism. Both look very much like each other.

All that being said, a big part of that is that the US market sets the tone for a lot of the world, and if you look deep enough into who really invests in a lot of these banks that invest in all the other business, and therefore effectively controls commerce, you may just find your way back to Beijing. To a large degree they bought us out via our own laws (and greed and debt) - so is the way our business operates actually capitalist at all, or are we a "21st century communist" state, because we're effectively ruled by one, because fiscally, they bought us outright?

As for 5G, though, it's a semi-cold-war-race. An attempt to head off what happened with LTE. Basically with cell especially, due to China's scale and buying power, whatever they buy becomes the world standard if for no other reason, it keeps the prices down. They vowed to convert to 5G, started planning for autonomous cars etc (no more parking lots, at least in Beijing, everything going forward will be built for drop-off zones for autonomous cars, not sure about other cities. To be fair to them, that's the one place I wholly agree with them and think they're the ones going the right direction.) But they're doing it all on 5G. Plus the "social credit" system requires everything to be connected, and they're banking IoT on 5G. So the race here was to beat them to the punch and roll it out first so that our standard was the defacto standard everyone stared buying from. Even if it's horribly dangerous, it's about "winning" not developing a good, safe system that makes sense.

Of course do I trust MicroGoogApplAzonBook any more than I trust the CCP? No, not really. It's just a matter of which group of thieves and tyrants rule our lives, not a question of if we're actually free.

@NEStalgia I hear what you're saying. Ragardles though, there's no changing the fact that we have no examples of communism every working. Meanwo, capitalism has been working much much better for whilw now.

@Kalmaro True, though if you really think about it we have a fluid definition of "working". USSR failed, but it failed largely from a mixture of it's traditional geographical problems, it's failure to indefinitely retain it's forcefully held territory which was largely acquired for the sole purpose of carving a revenge path to Berlin for WWII, mixed with losing a long war (via the cold war.) China, hasn't failed and may actually be winning.... Cuba is still Cuba. Hard to call whether that's success or fail, honestly.... and then, there's the smattering of smaller countries in Eastern Europe each with their own problems, and at the time, so much fallout from the global depression and WWII, and in many places WWI still never having been recovered from.

And no, I'm not suggesting it should be tried again, or can actually be a good thing - I already said there's no salvaging it, it's a disaster. But I think some of the metrics by which it's often condemned are circumstantial....it's not that it's not bad, it's that we're using the wrong reasoning and understanding to arrive at that otherwise correct answer. And the inverse applies to capitalism.

Both systems are tied to human nature, which twists everything including theocracy into the same morass.

@NEStalgia I think I understand what you are saying and I think that it's hard to compare the two. Largely because, one basically kills people and the other allows people to work their way up in most cases.

Both can be taken to the extreme but I would argue that communism already IS an extreme.

@NEStalgia
Well, if you want to stream games directly to a TV, you will need some kind of hardware. For Stadia, you need a compatible Chromecast device. I assumed this rumored streaming-only Xbox console would be an Xbox version of a Chromecast.

@Kalmaro To a degree, I think that's becoming semantics. Communist countries outright dispose of the unwanted, and tend to make a show of it as an example of disobedience. But on the same hand, the countries and time periods all that happened, I suspect a lot of the same outright murder mills would have happened anyway, even if the countries in question were capitalist. Like I said originally, one of the key failures of Communisim is that by definition it requires everyone to be willing participants, which is an impossibility without forming a new country in a new place to do so, and as such requires forcing willingness, or forceful removal of persons not willing to participate. That alone does lead to the violence, and does prevent it from actually working (without founding a new country of volunteers, at least.)

OTOH, the free market's ability for people to "work their way up" is a bit of a romantic nod to the past as well. Back in largely agrarian times where one could take care of themselves, in times of boom and manual labor, anyone could work hard and get their pay. Business startups and competition was everywhere, etc. But that's not now in this later stage. Investment has consolidated power and wealth, if not into an essentially Fascist structure, into a Feudal one, and the bureaucratic, institutionalized labor system feels like it's right out of the USSR.

I think there's a tendency to look past how the actual systems operate and see both through the storied and complicated 20th century history and circumstantial conditions rather than looking at what really works and doesn't work about each. There's a tendency in the West to gloss over the glaring problems with how the free market develops without resets and point to the evils of 20th century Communism as though they were all the simple cause of the socio-economic system and not connected to other problems of the time. And there's a problem in parts of Eastern Europe to remember the "good old days" among those that benefited most from those systems.

For Marx & Engel's part, the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. They get blamed for the evils of what happened. They didn't design or implement the systems, they never ran a government. They were academics writing political theory books. They did accurately assess core problems with free market. And the fact that we actually call it "capitalism" - a pejorative coined by Marx referring to the imbalance in power generated by those that held the capital - indicates that all sides borrowed something from his ideas. But the problem is while his work did very accurately describe the problems with the free market, his attempt at a solution came from a flawed concept of class warfare, and defines a solution that actually creates worse problems than the ones he was trying to solve. In a perfect world, we'd use his understanding of the problems with the free market to come up with better ways of addressing them than his now proven disastrous methods, rather than glossing over the problems entirely because we associate acknowledging problems he noted as one and the same with his terrible solutions, and associate him personally with the terrible governments that used his theories long after he was dead.

BUT, on the other hand, just as we're talking about in the Platinum thread with Tencent, is our problem really because capitalism inevitably leads to Communism, or is our problem primarily because we actually do live in a Communist country, purchased by Communists? Do our overlords at MicroGoogApplAzonBook simply mimic their Tencent counterparts as two sides of the same coin, or through the investors in the investors of their investors, are they actually controlled by them anyway? And will we actually ever know?

@NEStalgia I think the key failure of communism is that it's communism. I've heard several arguments how things could possibly have been better and I'll agree that perhaps it's possible it could work, but realistically speaking... It never will.

Capitalism is still helping people lift themselves up and it ultimately holds the individual responsible for their own growth.

The biggest problem we has is that certain corperohave gotten so big that healthy competition is impossible. Esser, we have monopolies and they need to be dealt with.

@Kalmaro The problem with communism is that the ideas it's based on are flawed ideas from the start. It was an attempt to fix correctly identified problems with free market "capitalism" (I still giggle any time that word is used, the word itself is a reference to the problems of the free market, as coined by the guy who invented communism! Every time someone celebrates "capitalism" they identify the system by it's flaws through the eyes of Marx It is, properly a free market, or free enterprise system. Calling it "capitalism" is basically saying "it's broken.") Anyway, it was an attempt, based on the limited and flawed ideas of a cloistered pair of academics, at correcting that. But you can't build on a bad foundation. They designed their system to revolve around principles that aren't actually true, and depended on an honor system that could never actually exist.

OTOH they were nothing but a pair of cloistered academics writing theory. It wasn't actually a "how to build a post-revolutionary government" instruction manual.....There was no long term refining and evaluation of the theory book. Angry people liked the sound of it, took it and tried to use it to build a government.

And therein lies the second problem of communism, which is that, by and large, it's a system designed around revenge, not about an actual functioning system. In a sense, it's a bi-product of the free market and aristrocratic systems, where if it gets too imbalanced, it leaves behind a large enough swath of a society who no longer feel represented in the market, and therefore take on a revolutionary tone and forge a revenge government, the primary focus of which is simply exactly revenge on those who previously wielded wealth/power, which then leads to mimicking the same behavior in the extreme.

In that sense we can almost say Communism is Capitalism's greatest flaw. Without "Capitalism" there would be no Communism. Communism is a direct response to anger and discontentment with failures Capitalism, in all cases, from its drafted theory to it's revolutionary implementations. Socialism is its odd step-child - an attempt for the aristocracies of the post-Classical period to retain control by bridging some of the popular desires for Communism into their aristrocratic semi-free markets.

Nobody's designed a new ACTUAL socio-economic system, short of those revenge driven systems, since the Renaissance.

But you're definitely on the right track, just, I think, understated with the current lack of competition. It's not just "certain companies" though. The drive for efficiency, and the ability for technology to bolster the control of scale has broken most of the features that make a free market work. Almost every industry consolidates into a duopoly or triopoly as standard. Competition, real competition, including regional competition is almost non-existent. Even inherently regional companies, before, have concentrated into national or global powerhouses. Things like land development tend to be controlled, nationally, by about 4 players now. Just 30 years ago that would have been unfathomable. It breaks the market on many levels. Startups are almost impossible to compete with that scale. It sets pricing. The companies themselves need to leverage such debt to operate which means a handful of banks control the boards of the majority of the companies that make up the entirity of most industries, nationally, and increasingly, globally. And who tends to own the escrow in most of these major global banks? Governments...including certain red ones. Which brings us right back to a command economy masquerading as a free market.

The keywords in today's "capitalism" are efficiency and centralization. Reducing costs through streamlining, reduction of product offerings, reduction of value offering, reduction of expense, consolidation, etc. In the past that opens the door to competition offering more. But today nobody could compete with that scale, so they in effect have total control of what the market is by dictating what it will be offered. It's been spinning out this way since the leveraged buyout boom in the mid 80's set it on the debt ridden path to this semi-Communist environment.