If streaming takes off to the point where it is a viable option (it will never beat having it on your hard drive or on disc) would Sony or Microsoft be able to go with Intel /Nvidia/proprietary processors/gpu's for future systems? I know that for financial reasons this would NEVER happen but would it be possible for the sake of folks being able to play their old games via streaming?
I'm not sure I understand the question?
Sony or MS could make a deal with whoever they want as far as who they partner with for their next devices. (The current partner is AMD, but PS3 was made with an NVIDIA partnership, Xbox had ATI and IBM; in neither case is the old CPU or GPU what's enabling or holding back old-system compatibility, as they both have rights of control and proper technical breakdowns over the hardware designs they contracted.)
...But if streaming
truly takes off, the "future system" kind of doesn't matter because it just needs to be whatever can catch and display the stream. The steaming cloud computers would have to be advanced, but your TV could play a game as easily as it can play a Netflix movie or play a track off Spotify. (The TV might be the receiver for the controller, or the controller itself might send signals straight into the WiFi to the Cloud running your game.) PlayStation 9 may be a console (
a bubble console) you buy, or it may just be a subscription service you buy into.
And then, as far as old games, again, they can do what they want. There are complications since these aren't proprietary chips as much as they were back in the day, but Sony and Microsoft own the hardware they paid to have produced for them. So if they need to have software of those devices operate in a different form in the future, they should be clear to do that, within their contracts. We have plenty of emulation devices on the market if they wanted to go that route (with a heavy-enough PC, you can emulate Xbox 360 and PS3 games, so in due time, a "PS3 Classic" could be marketed, albeit I don't think it'll happen.) Or they could put together hardware that is based on the old chipset (although likely, it wouldn't be the actual old chips, it'd be a set of FPGA chips built to replicate individual parts of the hardware) and plays old games that way. There are companies out there already that take deconstructions/replications of old hardware and re-encase them into like a portable or TV box, and there are lots of emulation machines for other types of classic gaming as well.
Is that getting close to what you're asking?
