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Also shipping. You only need to ship the platform in a GaaS model once, and you build a data center once. From there you're just uploading/transferring code. With physical games you need to produce the games and ship them each time a new one comes out. Not to mention packaging etc.

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Well, but most games are delivered digitally now (https://www.statista.com/statistics/190225/digital-and-physi...). I wonder how the bandwidth to deliver the full game compares to the bandwidth to stream video of the game if you're playing it 100% over the internet.

I think we can consider the devices where the content is accessed as thin clients. There is some literature supporting the thin client architecture (e.g. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/55689271.pdf) and it seems that the power consumption can reduce significantly (3x). These studies do not take in account this particular case but I think they can give you an idea of the scale.

It would also reduce the ratio players:console. A personal console stays most of the time off, in a data-center you can increase usage by an order of magnitude. So at the end, even if they buy new hardware every year it would cost less physical resources overall.

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