acl wrote on 2023-02-08, 13:44:What really confuses me for the future is that younger generation just can't use computers.
Sure, they use smartphones, tablets […]
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dionb wrote on 2023-02-08, 09:45:
And even with the V5-6k, there are people who through incompentence kill theirs... that means shrinking supply, so even if the number of enthousiasts starts dropping at some point, prices probably won't.
What really confuses me for the future is that younger generation just can't use computers.
Sure, they use smartphones, tablets and web apps, but these are a ways to consume content, you can't tinker with these devices.
These are just devices promoted by online services to provide a frictionless experience for the user to consume content with ease and spend money.
Game consoles are built with that in mind too. Plug, pay, play. Nothing technical to know.
In 10y, there will be nothing to collect anymore. Because gaming will move to cloud platforms.
Software editors will go 100% for it because it will kill piracy and provide them recurrent income from subscriptions.
No more gaming PCs.
Those are two very separate things, and I'm not so concerned about the former.
Thing is, we're seeing the same with computer literacy as we see with regular literacy: in the past a small group of highly invested people were involved with computing (as with writing books) so everyone who used them appeared competent. Instead now absolutely everyone is online on some sort of device and just as people lament the state of the English (or indeed any other) language with all the crap posted on social media, the thing to bear in mind is that the vast majority of those would never even have written anything in the past, let alone published it so we could read it. Underneath all that there are still just as many people deeply into language and writing as before, it's just they've become a small minority so you don't see them. Same with computers: there are still enough geeks like us in the younger generation. You just don't see them as they are outnumbered by all the casual smartphone/laptop users who in the past would never have gone near a computer.
My three children are doing well enough, only one actively interested in retro computing (mainly hacking our antiquated Wii console, although he's now working on getting an Xbox 360 controller working on the PC), but my eldest can strip & rebuild their PC if needed and my youngest loves driving his teachers mad by messing around with HTML in the browser inspector and adding very erm... poopy things into his (and his classmates') schoolwork.
As for the frictionless experience - be glad it usually is and the less technically inclined don't need continuous support. Those who are still can have enough fun with the supposedly 'closed' hardware. And as for everything in the cloud:
Gmlb256 wrote on 2023-02-08, 14:22:
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I disagree, cloud gaming will be inevitably adopted in the long term once all the global inconsistencies with network speed and latencies are dealt with.
Definitely. And I think that that will happen around the same time we have world peace and equitable distribution of income and resources 😉