I’m pretty damn sure it won’t.
Everybody thinks cloud gaming is the future. And so does Ubisoft. So much so, that they think there will be maybe one more console generation before it subsumes the hardware market.
In an interview with Variety, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot stated that he expects streaming to become the norm the generation after the next.
I think we will see another generation, but there is a good chance that step-by-step we will see less and less hardware. With time, I think streaming will become more accessible to many players and make it not necessary to have big hardware at home.
There will be one more console generation and then after that, we will be streaming, all of us.
I kinda doubt that.
It is going to help the AAA game industry grow much faster. We have to work on the accessibility of those games, to make sure they can be played on any device, but the fact that we will be able to stream those games on mobile phones and television screens without a console is going to change a lot of the industry.
Alright, let me pump the brakes right here. 3D? Fad. VR? Was temporarily popular in the 90s when the tech just wasn’t there, and is still mostly a novelty now that it’s popular again. Stream Gaming, on the other hand, has never once been popular with the end user. I literally can’t put a number on the number of game streaming services that came out, and then I never heard from again. You need a good, consistent internet connection 100% of the time for it to work, and even in 10 years I don’t see that happening.
Not the only ones
EA has also made a similar calculation. In a recent call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said:
We talked about a three to five-year time horizon. We believe that cloud gaming is going to make a meaningful contribution to the way players engage with games.
What that does mean is it really doesn’t matter what device you’re accessing it by. The experience that you have is governed by the size of the screen and the amount of time you have to play.
Everything we’re building right now, we are thinking about a world where we will not be bound by device. We will not be bound by local compute or memory, but much of these experiences will exist in the cloud, and you’ll access them based on whatever device you have access to at the time.
Reminder: this is something they’re pushing so that you’ll buy a subscription.
Microsoft is also keen on the idea. Phil Spencer has mentioned the idea of having, for example, Minecraft playable across a number of different devices, all able to communicate with each other.
[Minecraft] is a particularly good example. We’re updating Minecraft to play across as many devices as we can, toward a goal of having every Minecraft player in the world able to watch, communicate and play together.We’re focused on this mission for the future of gaming at Microsoft. I look at investing into three key areas: content, cloud, and community – that is, making great games, making the experience of accessing and playing them better and improving things for the players overall.
But he doesn’t discount the value of hardware in this:
Regarding your specific question about console generations, this is why I still see games themselves evolving beyond generations, and I’d like to keep evolving hardware as multi-generational too.
Source: VG 24/7
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