Two points that I thought of: first, I wonder what this would mean for handheld systems, especially as e-shops for them become more common and storage gets larger in volume and smaller in size. Secondly, some of the problems, especially that of complete publisher control, reminds me of my issue with e-books, except, of course, much more devastating to the state of human knowledge.
Thoughts?
That article is extremely logically flawed. The author thinks that the only thing that makes a console a console is the fact that it can play a disk. That’s just stupid. Shoot, Valve is going to release a console. Their “Steam Machine” won’t use disks and yet it will still be a console. The death of the DVD does not mean the death of all boxes that connect to your television.
Which, I note, are exactly the qualities that the writer argues makes for a Brave New World. And frankly, I’m actually thinking a lot about what you call a machine that can only play a game in the cloud, because I’m not 100% sure it’s a “console” to me…
Yeah, not a great article.
Yes, we’re gradually moving to digital distribution of games. This is probably the last generation of consoles that will distribute software on disks. However, there is still value in having a high-powered processor connected directly to your display. Streaming services like PlayStation Now will always be mediocre because of network latency. You’ll always get a better experience if the game is running locally, which means there will always be a market for “console-like” hardware. Plus, as the author points out, streaming chews up lots and lots of network bandwidth – much more than downloading a game once and playing it locally.
In the long run console hardware may be cheap enough to be integrated with TVs. Or maybe when you buy a TV you get a basic built-in gaming system and then you can buy a hardware upgrade if you’re serious about games. (Sony is particularly well-positioned to capitalize on this sort of convergence.) But having console hardware migrate into the TV doesn’t mean the console is going away – it just means that it becomes more ubiquitous.
And the idea that Sony would allow its content to run on other platforms is laughable. Sony is, fundamentally, a consumer electronics company. They make content to sell electronics. They’re not going to make content so Apple can sell electronics.
A console is just a dedicated, self-contained box that you connect to a TV to play games. Running discs is sortof a completely irrelevant quality. Did we only INVENT consoles when we moved to discs? What did you call cartridge-based consoles then?
How the console gets its games is irrelevant. A dedicated box is a dedicated box. Getting your content digitally doesn’t magically make it into a PC, or into some mysterious new device. It’s still just a console.
Didn’t read it, but likely it’s cyclical. Consoles were huge in the 80’s, died, then a resurgence in the 90’s, huge again in the 2000’s, etc. Same thing is apparently happening with PC games.
Imho, as players mature, they want a deeper experience. It’s natural to move from consoles to PC games. When this generation has kids and jobs, PC games decline again. Then, the next generation starts the console demand again.
The article makes some good points, but it seems to me that it’s saying consoles aren’t going to disappear, they’re just going to become more like PC’s.
Yeah, I agree that discs will be dead after this gen, but I don’t agree that cloud based gaming will replace consoles. Perhaps the first competent online services + mobile gaming will take a big chunk out of consoles, possibly even PC gaming will take a nibble as the more hardcore tend to migrate over close to the end of a generation when PC has a lot more to offer a hobbyist gamer.
Cloud based gaming taking over the mainstream WILL happen, and that’s the day the traditional console dies (all the while becoming more and more PC-like, I’d wager). But that day is still pretty far off. The network infrastructure is not there, the data center infrastructure is not there (you’re going to need the GPU horsepower equivalent of 80+ million consoles in those data centers after all), and there are still issues that need to be resolved, such as latency.
Consoles never really died. The Atari 2600 (and its somewhat less-sucessful follow-ups, the 5200 and 7800) were produced throughout the '80s, overlapping with the NES and Sega Master System. Those in turn overlapped with the new introductions from both of those companies.
The perceived lack of success of consoles comes from the companies trying to muscle in on the business with no success, largely because their products were garbage. But they’ve always been popular.
I’m not entirely sure. I was looking at some of the all time game sales numbers, and there are some curious numbers for the Wii. Wii sports is the highest selling game of all time, but mostly because the Wii is the highest selling console of all time, and Wii Sports came with it. I had a wii, and the games were terrible. I bought like 5, and all 5 were ports from other systems. The only one that was even decent was Mario Kart Wii, and it was like a 4 year old port of the Game Boy version.
I’ve been hearing about the impending death of of console gaming for at least 15 years, probably longer.
Wasn’t I reading just a year or two ago about the impending death of PCs due to how awesome consoles had become?
The latest generation of consoles blurs the line between gaming console, PC and cable box pretty strongly.
I suspect consoles will die, but so will cable boxes, and PCs, and they’ll be replaced by these Xbox One like all-in-one entertainment consoles that will stream video and games and whatever else, as well as allow web browsing. productivity apps, etc…
I’m not really clear on what point you are trying to make here, exactly?
Here are a few simple facts:
Console releases of multiplatform titles continue to perform well enough that people who make multiplatform titles continue to make them
More and more titles are multiplatform now, with exclusives essentially limited to in house titles, games that just DON’T work on consoles due to REQUIRING A keyboard, and… MMOs (which are moving console-wards slowly.)
Clearly, people are convinced there is money to be made in consoles, or at least, console ports. Similarly, people are convinced there is money to be made in the PC space - but not so much that they are generally making exclusives anymore.
While there is no way to know what the future will bring, keep in mind that people have been predicting both the death of consoles and PC’s since the early 80’s. Also that PC’s and consoles would merge together. None of these things have happened, and I don’t see any mergers or demises in the near future.
Yes, digital downloads have become increasingly popular, and I could see a situation in the future where most people have access to a super fast broadband connection (fiber optic is heading in that direction) that makes it possible to stream games at the start of play rather than storing them on the box.
But I can’t see one where all the processing is done on a giant super computer and not at the users machine. If you think about the insane amount of processing that would be needed to run potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions of copies of different games at the same time, it’s just too much. Even if it were possible, isn’t that basically transferring hardware costs (which have been very high since the early days) to the game companies rather than the end users? I very seriously doubt it’s going to happen.
The latest consoles load the game from the DVD onto the hard drive and play it from there. Most of them only use the disc as a verification of ownership.
There’s no reason the proposed consoles/entertainment boxes couldn’t just download the games and go from there.
And… Xbox One game sometimes do offload processing to the cloud already, so it’s happening as we speak. (read up on Titanfall for an exapmle)
Mario Kart Wii was an original game, not a port, and it sold almost 36 million copies. It was, IIRC, the most popular non-bundled game of the PS3/Wii/Xbox 360 era by a significant margin.
Also, the 53-47 split between digital sales and retail sales that the article talks about is misleading. For one, digital sales refers to all money made by the sale of “subscriptions, digital full games, digital add-on content, mobile apps and social network gaming.” And two, the retail side doesn’t include used games. It skews the data in favor of digital and ignores the fact that bandwidth is going to start hurting if many more people start buying exclusively digital games. Services like Steam work as well as they do and are as popular as they are because they’re not too popular.
My point is that it seems the Wii was highly successful, but Wii Sports technically wasn’t sold separately and Mario Kart Wii wasn’t an original game for the Wii. Almost no games produced by other companies besides nintendo were successful for the Wii, with most games for the Wii being universally reviled.
Again, you’re wrong on both counts. Wii Sports wasn’t initially sold separately. Eventually it was. And Mario Kart Wii is an original game.
So? Nintendo doesn’t make consoles to sell other people’s games. They care about their own first and foremost. And almost everything Nintendo published in the Wii era was a stone-cold classic. Wii Sports, Mario Kart Wii, Super Mario Galaxy, Punch-Out, Zelda: Twilight Princess, Zelda: Skyward Sword, Smash Bros Brawl, and on and on and one. And each one sold a ridiculous number of copies.
I think I see the confusion here. Superhal is saying that Kart is a port to the Wii from other Nintendo consoles not from another gaming company. I don’t agree that makes it a port, they did add new content, but I think that’s what he’s saying.