Most kids don't even know what it's like to play a game that's not riddled with ads and designed around microtransactions.

There are a lot of things that require a generation (of people) to change. For example, the latency of game streaming services is awful if you're used to a local experience, but if you ask a 12 year old that's never experienced low latency, local gaming, they don't even realize it could be different. They'll happily play high latency streamed games.

So when you see things like the investment that's going into things like game streaming and it seems stupid, you have to consider there may not be any expectation of capturing the current market. They're after the market that's in elementary school right now.

I don't know -- when I was a kid, in the arcade, the machines constantly prompted me to insert another quarter to continue playing.

The nice thing about those games is the cost could be offset by skill. FTP games now offset the cost using time, when you can offset it at all.

Yeah, but we solved that problem, and now it's back.

> For example, the latency of game streaming services is awful if you're used to a local experience, but if you ask a 12 year old that's never experienced low latency, local gaming, they don't even realize it could be different. They'll happily play high latency streamed games.

That's subjective and dependent on the service and the game. I have Stadia, GeForce Now, and local games ( with some overlap). Latency is minimal and barely visible ( invisible for grand strategy games).

>the latency of game streaming services is awful

Latency is not a problem with game streaming. I'd say quality is more of a problem. With streaming you are only going to get the image a few frames late which is not bad at all.

Based on your comment, the already-bad state of latency across the software stack will get even worse. I really don't want that.