History says otherwise. Tech prices are very competitive, and the proverbial "race to the bottom" trend hasn't been bucked very often. Furthermore, when you don't need high-end hardware to access computing resources, devices will become more disposable, will be available to people of lower income brackets, will be more of an impulse buy, etc. All things that companies LOVE.

Obviously this is just my opinion, but I'd put a lot of money on the "cheap access device" gamble.



Yes, but, despite what you hear from internet nerds, the outages were fairly minor, and are unlikely to last. WoW is a good example. There was some server stress in the beginning, but things were soon figured out. There was the occasional rare outage, but, for the most part, the servers have been rock solid.

While we're talking about minor points, I also left out some of the small positives of D3's online nature, such as the elimination of in-game cheating, which was absolutely rampant in its predecessor.



You might be right. I'm something of a technological optimist, though, and I don't think it's right to avoid improvements because of worries about "the man." Moving everything into the cloud is simply too huge of an advantage to pass up. One day soon, everyone will have access to every level of hardware and software with virtually no personal investment. I know it's hard to be excited about it now, given the state of current cloud offerings available to us, but I really believe that centralization will be a game-changer. Mostly for the better.