WIndows 10 Game Mode, is this the beginning of trouble for Steam games?

Actually the direction the large studios will be taking is more likely to be a transition to streaming game content, the platform used behind the scenes might end up being completely proprietary. The plus side is that it'll be platform agnostic the downside is you'll not be able to mod anything, or even tweak you settings beyond some basic adjustments - although that is already the case with the implementation of current copy protection schemes. Look at Doom, completely locked down.

I'm not convinced streaming services are fully ready for prime time yet as a full replacement for high end gaming PCs. There are latency and maximum fps limitations, and that's assuming you have a good internet connection which many do not have in the US yet. That rural last mile issue is a real problem in such a large country, not to mention bad ISP troubles with throttling being on the table again etc.

Someday maybe, just not yet, except for a lucky few and even then, the experience will still be inferior to what you could have on a PC sitting next to you for a long time to come.

You may be right eventually, if priced right, it could make inroads just like consoles did in the past just from a simplicity and lower initial cost for the end user standpoint. The cost over the life of the service will likely not be competitive but that's another topic.

I hope it's never ready. I can't think of any huge benefits over something like Steam other than not having to own a slick PC. I can see why big publishers would want to do a streaming service since it works so well for films and TV shows but game streaming would be a totally different beast given the PC market. I can see console folks gobbling that shit up though when they get the technical details figured out.

The infrastructure costs and end-user minimum requirements put this development really far off.

Remember a few years ago when everyone was fapping to cloud services, and the hot take was that all of your devices' compute would be offloaded to third parties?

It's still cheaper to buy a decent GPU and do machine learning at home than it is to rent an AWS instance for like 2 trainings.

F*ck M$'s glorified 'game mode' and their ploy to convince users to upgrade to Win10 as their only option to take advantage of DX12. Win10 implements UWP as M$'s walled garden to make 1st party titles exclusive and hold them hostage. Regardless I will still game exclusively using my Win8 and 7 partitions.

PCPer talks about the Game Mode benchmark, not much to talk about other than what we already speculated.