It's dystopian in the sense that nothing is actually owned anymore. I grew up collecting games and still collect them now, and for a ton of people (the average gamer is in their mid-30s, and that's a massive demographic) still likes to collect their games. They like a shelf of titles. Heck, even those who buy digital have little digital collections, and more power to 'em.
But paying a monthly fee and having my gaming time leased out to me by MegaCorp is not anything I'm interested in. I want to pick what I enjoy, buy it, and play it. I'm not crazy for thinking that way, collecting is part of the fun of gaming for me and many others.
Speaking of the 4G/5G, I cannot fathom a world where you can be on a subway underground and somehow have a perfect streaming connection. And subways are only in major cities - what about the rest of the entire country? The current infrastructure, heck, the infrastructure of 10 years from now isn't built to handle this kind of bandwidth for constant streaming. It's not even efficient - always-online services have been vilified by the gaming community, and now somehow we're celebrating being stuck on 1 TV, playing at home.
Sigh. I feel like this whole industry has left me behind, and nothing makes sense anymore.
I'd say the vast majority of PC gamers right now have maybe one or two special edition physical boxes and everything else is digital in their Steam/Origin/Epic accounts. As it is right now at any point those accounts can be closed down without oversight or warning, and you don't legally own the games in your steam account. I don't see game streaming fundamentally changing things at this point, the "own your games" ship sailed long ago. Also like many steam users I have a metric ton of games in my account that I will likely never play or use again in my lifetime. A monthly rental playing a catalog of old games and some new ones might honestly end up costing me less then having all those old useless games in my library that I played once for 2 hours and can't return that I'll never play again.
As for the subway thing, wifi networks are becoming more and more ubiquitous and advanced, I know my local subway has it's own inbuilt wifi, obviously it's not going to be amazing any time soon but between that and 5g and the hotswapping connections to keep uptime, idk it can work.
You appear to be somewhat biased by your surrounding infrastructure which does not reflect the state of the rest of the developed world. You see, a lot of subways have excellent LTE because the carries deployed their network antennas underground. Besides, for a lot of cities, public transit lives primarily above ground. On top of all that, LTE in the US is terrible compared to other countries which can easily average 50-100Mbps: http://research.rewheel.fi/
But paying a monthly fee and having my gaming time leased out to me by MegaCorp is not anything I'm interested in. I want to pick what I enjoy, buy it, and play it. I'm not crazy for thinking that way, collecting is part of the fun of gaming for me and many others.
Speaking of the 4G/5G, I cannot fathom a world where you can be on a subway underground and somehow have a perfect streaming connection. And subways are only in major cities - what about the rest of the entire country? The current infrastructure, heck, the infrastructure of 10 years from now isn't built to handle this kind of bandwidth for constant streaming. It's not even efficient - always-online services have been vilified by the gaming community, and now somehow we're celebrating being stuck on 1 TV, playing at home.
Sigh. I feel like this whole industry has left me behind, and nothing makes sense anymore.