Google has now announced their Stadia Game Streaming Service, it comes with their own controller directly connected to wifi to avoid inputlag and you can then choose to play games that are streamed to your desktop.
Solutions like this exist already, most namely Playstation Home, there you can choose to play a game just as you choose to watch a move in netflix, but you can only play older games there right now, for newer games you can only use remote desktop gaming pcs, which are offered for example by the shadow service, but there you need to install all the software yourself and get yourself also a full price lilcence for a game. Google wants to be able to stream AAA games on their cloud service too, if I recall correctly, so youll be able to play the newest games on high quality via stream.
So will these Game Streaming services become the next big thing? Besides private users not needing to have the newest hardware and having to download/install/configure the game manually, there are also other advantages; publishers could circumvent piracy via streaming and cheating would become harder too in multiplayer games, most importantly game developers can design their game to run only on one specified hardware, which would reduce development costs and also renders the game more performant/beautiful.
The big downside in streaming though is the big need for bandwidth ... most people who do not live in big cities or do live in a bad internet spot, just wont be able to play games on a stream with good video quality.
Can this be the decisive factor for game developers continuing to provide games for manual installation to run on a private pc/console and people will still favor to play on private hardware for competetive reasons?
Thinking forward 5-10 years ... this factor could become unrelevant, because 5G mobile internet will be available everywhere and most users will also have access to xx TB download limit with 1 GBps connection speeds ... maybe then you will see most games only being made available via streaming services?