Former PSN eng here.
So, it will be very interesting to see what is going to happen. I feel we were not very successful with Playstation Now. It requires a lot of money to even start scaling, you need a powerful (read expensive) machine which can be fully utilized by just 1 AAA game. And for any competitive gaming experience - latency is a big one. If you want to play multiplayer as you going to have latency to Google's machine and then to the game server.
Anyway, I'm not in gaming business any more, so I wish G good luck in disrupting the industry. It is just they were not really that sucsessful in disrupting anything they didn't acquire (read copied and tried to improve), but maybe this time...
What do you think of Google's controller? Having it bypass the laptop/chromecast and connect directly to wifi seems like it will save some latency, but how much?
The controller was the most exciting part of the announcement, for me. I think it's a really smart move to connect the controller directly to the network and not through the "console". It makes the controller a first class citizen and gives it the ability to do all kinds of neat things.
My guess, they did it because of the browser. Idea is very good and makes total sense - you don’t have to integrate your controller with every browser, you just stream in it.
Anyway, I'm not in gaming business any more, so I wish G good luck in disrupting the industry. It is just they were not really that sucsessful in disrupting anything they didn't acquire (read copied and tried to improve), but maybe this time...