It’s Monday people. Time to sober up and drag yourself into work but first, here’s an article on the future of gaming consoles.
I went to a lecture a while ago where an expert on the future of computer gaming, we’ll call this guy Phil because I don’t remember his name. Anyway, Phil speculated that the next console generation (the Xbox 720, the Playstaion 4 and whatever bollocks Nintendo’s naming there next one) will be the last.
The idea is that with most games being available through download and the development of streaming games, consoles as they’re defined today will no longer be relevant. In the future, Phil hypothesised consoles would be replaced with either small adapters (which has already happened, it’s just not that wide spread onlive) that will connect to high-end possessors that do all the heavy lifting. Or the necessary software will just be loaded onto your TV which by that point will just be computers apparently.
It make scene from a business point of view considering the massive loss Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo makes on consoles and Steam has proven that downloading games can work on a massive scale.
So what do you think? Does a world without consoles sound good? Have they served there propose or are they offering enough new features to keep them with the times?
I personally like having a dedicated gaming platform and hard copies of games, though that’s mostly down to my manic paranoia about computers. Only a digital copy? No! It’ll delete itself somehow!!
See you next week!
You can already download games to your console after you buy them online. In the future, the companies can simply shift the distribution method away from bricks & mortar stores so that all games can be purchased online. (It’s just that right now B&M stores drive so much volume that I guess the publishers don’t want to piss them off?)
2- On the technical side, a console can make sense since a device specialized to play games will be very good at it. So a console and a cheap desktop/laptop (that’s not so great at playing games) can suffice for most people’s needs.
And by having very few hardware configurations, they are slightly cheaper to develop for (though a lot of games will also be made for PC and all the consoles).