Sony and Microsoft have been walking the same path for nearly 20 years, when it comes to gaming hardware. Instead of leaves, shiny silver game discs dangle from the trees, while black and white boxes of varying sizes line the underbrush, covered in decades of debris and Doritos dust. Both companies know this trail well -- but it's about to split in two. Microsoft is taking the right fork. This one doesn't have game discs at all: The latest Xbox, revealed just this week, is called the One S All-Digital Edition and it's designed for online, download-centric gaming.

As recently as five years ago, the advent of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube Premium sounded the death knell for multi-billion dollar businesses, altered the living-room habits of millions of people, and changed studio production structures permanently. Companies that adapted survived, and the viewing audience received a handful of clear benefits in return -- most notably the ability to watch high-quality shows and movies on demand and, most recently, an explosion of award-winning, culturally transformative entertainment options. The idea of a "Netflix for games" service has been floating around since long before video-streaming became a thing, but it hasn't found a solid foothold quite yet. Streaming games is a more complicated process than streaming video, since it adds user input to the mix. While being piped into a player's home or phone from a server that could be hundreds of miles away, the game has to respond, without lag, to every button press a player makes.

Finally, the laptop that might see the biggest improvement in 2017 is yours, even if it's a piece of junk. Nvidia's GeForce Now stole the spotlight at the company's CES 2017 keynote, and it held up wonderfully in my brief hands-on with the service. GeForce Now even opened up positively sacrilegious scenarios like playing Witcher 3 on a MacBook Air or Rise of the Tomb Raider on a 5K iMac--gaming experiences you could never, ever achieve on Apple hardware otherwise. GeForce Now's expensive pricing tiers--$25 for 20 hours at GTX 1060-quality graphics, or 10 hours at GTX 1080 levels--drew immediate fire, however. Interestingly, startup LiquidSky held an event of its own just two days later and announced a PC game-streaming service that essentially works the same as Nvidia's service.