Consoles set for extinction !

[_scout_]

*Invader Zim* We're doomed!

Square Enix: Consoles set for extinction
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/36665/Square-Enix-Consoles-set-for-extinction

Square Enix chief Yoichi Wada is preparing his firm for the demise of physical media – and potentially the death of home consoles.

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“In the past the platform was hardware, but it has switched to the network. A time will come when the hardware isn’t even needed anymore.
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Sorry I just wanted to start a thread ;).


I game on PC and Consoles.

PC games = games I play with ppl who can not come over to my place.
Console games = games I play with ppl who can come over to my place.

[WarrenM]

Wow, PC vs Console stuff in the first post. GG!

[Quitch]

Yeah, and a time may come when we hook our brains directly to the hive mind, but saying it's coming is pretty meaningless by iteself.

[extarbags]

The full relevant quote:


“In the past the platform was hardware, but it has switched to the network. A time will come when the hardware isn’t even needed anymore.

“With that, any kind of terminal becomes a potential platform on which games can be played – that’s exponential growth in the potential of gaming. The potential size of the market is enormous.”

I agree that physical media is on its way out and probably just won't exist anymore after another decade or two at most, but dummy terminals replacing hardware? Yeah... that's how Flash games work currently. Rendering a current console game on a remote server and streaming it to a nothing machine would take an unbelievable amount of bandwidth, the likes of which is unlikely to be widely affordable for another ten, twenty, maybe thirty years at least. That, plus the fact that the requirements will be rising almost as fast as the available bandwidth as graphics (etc) improve, and the fact that this scheme actually has to be profitable for the content producers, and... yeah, "a time will come" might be accurate, but there's no telling when or if it will even be in our lifetimes.

[WarrenM]

There is something to be said for paying for a remote server farm to render the game and just send you the results - on the assumption it could be done in real time, of course. Then you'd never need to buy a new console, upgrade your PC, or whatever - let the server provider worry about that.

[Razgon]

Why would it take unbelievable amounts of bandwidth? Most pc games works with a click of the mouse, or the keyboard, right? Thats all you need to send - and what you need to send back to the user, is a movie representation of what happens on the screen. Thats how I envision it, anyways, not that the entire program is streamed

[TheTrunkDr]

The full relevant quote:



I agree that physical media is on its way out and probably just won't exist anymore after another decade or two at most, but dummy terminals replacing hardware? Yeah... that's how Flash games work currently. Rendering a current console game on a remote server and streaming it to a nothing machine would take an unbelievable amount of bandwidth, the likes of which is unlikely to be widely affordable for another ten, twenty, maybe thirty years at least. That, plus the fact that the requirements will be rising almost as fast as the available bandwidth as graphics (etc) improve, and the fact that this scheme actually has to be profitable for the content producers, and... yeah, "a time will come" might be accurate, but there's no telling when or if it will even be in our lifetimes.
You can practically set your watch by it, as someone calls for the death of consoles or the replacement of devices with "thin clients" or "dumb terminals."

This likely won't happen because businesses are happy to let the consumers pay for the amount of computing power they want rather than pay for more hardware to support their users.

I remember when I was in college some guy from some telecommunications company coming in and telling us all that we'll be back to the world of servers doing the processing and clients being little more than IO machines. It was particularly funny, in retrospect, as he used cell phones as his example of devices that will get simpler while the servers will get more powerful and process all your data. I think the current gen of smartphones have pretty much sunk that idea.

[WarrenM]

Why would it take unbelievable amounts of bandwidth? Most pc games works with a click of the mouse, or the keyboard, right? Thats all you need to send - and what you need to send back to the user, is a movie representation of what happens on the screen. Thats how I envision it, anyways, not that the entire program is streamed
It's essentially full screen video, no compression, with full audio and no lag. Multiply that by a few thousand users and you begin to see where there is no way in hell this is happening.

[Razgon]

It's essentially full screen video, no compression, with full audio and no lag. Multiply that by a few thousand users and you begin to see where there is no way in hell this is happening.

But isnt that exactly what Zune is doing on the Xbox with their HD videos?

[Robert Sharp]

Wow, PC vs Console stuff in the first post. GG!

Ummm...he was just clarifying that he did NOT mean to start such a debate. The point was about whether we will need client side hardware of any sort, so it has nothing to do with PC vs. consoles.

[Fugitive]

But isnt that exactly what Zune is doing on the Xbox with their HD videos?
The data stream there is precompressed, and latency doesn't matter since there's no interactivity.

[Razgon]

The data stream there is precompressed, and latency doesn't matter since there's no interactivity.

ah - that makes sense! Thanks...but, I dont think its that remote a possiblity, but the money has to be behind it of course.

[Crater]

Console gaming is DOMED.

In some ways, I see Wada's point. If services like OnLive prove to be successful (comercially and technically), you could conceivably sell a lot more consoles. They'd be so cheap to make if they didn't need to have all the hardware included.

But more realistically, I don't see how those types of games would replace existing console or PC games. Latency issues aside, I have a hard time envisioning how the server farms would be able to scale with an increased number of users.

XBox live had 2 million concurrent users recently. Even if half of those people were idle at any given point in time, that still means you'd need hardware to support a million players at once (and massive bandwidth, too). I just don't see that happening until there are some profound technological improvements.

[Ben Sones]

Like extarbags, I'm skeptical about the end of hardware platforms. The physical media bit is certainly valid, though. Perhaps the conclusion should be that Gamestop's days are numbered?

[Dave Long]

I think we're a very long way from where the masses buy games online only for their TVs. Very, very long way...

[Robert Sharp]

Yeah, I agree. Anyone know the percentage of console users that buy games on Live, VC, etc?

[Ben Sones]

I think we're a very long way from where the masses buy games online only for their TVs. Very, very long way...

Care to bet on that? It won't be the next gen, but I'd wager that the next gen will make online connectivity so accessible that we'll end up with a majority of consoles online, and online purchasing will become an option even for new, full-price games. And I wouldn't be surprised if, the generation after that, at least one of the console makers has digital purchasing of content as their main feature, and the primary way to get games.

[TheTrunkDr]

Like extarbags, I'm skeptical about the end of hardware platforms. The physical media bit is certainly valid, though. Perhaps the conclusion should be that Gamestop's days are numbered?
Eventually but I don't think it'll be as soon as some think. Physical media simply has more capacity. You can fit what 50 gigs or something on a Blu-ray disk? How long would it take to download that, consider that new formats will come out that could hold even more. By the time 50 gigs is a viable download size physical media could easily be in the several terabyte range.

[forgeforsaken]

This is about things like OnLive and GaiKai. It's not just consoles that are potentially doomed with this but PCs too.

[Dave Long]

Care to bet on that? It won't be the next gen, but I'd wager that the next gen will make online connectivity so accessible that we'll end up with a majority of consoles online, and online purchasing will become an option even for new, full-price games. And I wouldn't be surprised if, the generation after that, at least one of the console makers has digital purchasing of content as their main feature, and the primary way to get games.
I think the majority of console gamers are still not online in any meaningful way. Sales of the Wii support that. It's like the thread here about single player games still being the primary way people play, by a wide margin. Gamers blow the online side of things way out of proportion to reality.

And here you're not even just talking about playing games onilne, you're talking about delivering them specifically via online only. It's not going to happen as soon as you think.

Accessibility and people actually using that as their primary purchase method are two entirely different things, especially among the vast masses of potential game purchasers.

Plus... you have that massive issue of "How do they find the games?" which I think is a huge problem. PSP Go! seems to be proving that right now as well. No one understands what the heck is going on with that device and trying to sell games on giftcards doesn't seem to be working like they thought it would.

[Foxstab]

Wasn't there a long thread here about OnLive or a similar startup company, I think one of the Qt3 members is a representative there?

How is that venture going?

[malkav11]

I think people also radically overestimate how many people have access to any sort of high speed internet, especially without some sort of horrible usage cap.

I mean, I'm pretty happy with my 5 gigabit DSL, but I have no access to the faster services. They simply won't hook me up. And I live in the center of a fairly high population metro area. And it costs me $60 a month, which is not chump change. It's so central to what I do at home that it's totally worth it, but I'm not usual in that.

[Nezz]

Eventually but I don't think it'll be as soon as some think. Physical media simply has more capacity. You can fit what 50 gigs or something on a Blu-ray disk? How long would it take to download that, consider that new formats will come out that could hold even more. By the time 50 gigs is a viable download size physical media could easily be in the several terabyte range.
Budgets and team sizes are already spiralling out of manageable levels to fill a DVD. How much will it cost to produce terabytes of content? I think games will get smaller, not bigger.

[Quitch]

I doubt it, with hard drive and memory prices having dropped dramatically since the latest set of consoles was released. Especially as it's texture resolution which accounts for a large chunk of that size, you can fill the space without putting a greater burden on the graphics team who already work at a higher resolution than ships with the game.

[Ben Sones]

More texture resolution requires more processing power, though, and we've reached a bit of a plateau in that regard. It's getting more expensive to deliver the sort of graphical horsepower iterations that we've had in the past, and I think everyone has learned the lesson this gen that high launch price points are a terrible idea. Expect the next generation of consoles to be much less of a step up in graphics than past generations have been. We'll hear plenty of "Xbox 360.5" jokes, and I suspect the console makers will try to compensate by pushing other features instead of graphics (fancy controllers, online functionality, etc.).

[Mordrak]

What I'd like them to do in the next generation or two is come up with a tightly bound parameters of a common standard for hardware and playback functionality so the silly hardware wars can be over. I was reminded of this during Tom's interview with Nawid A and their inability to play against each other. It seems like such an artificial restriction that can hurt your title no matter how easy it is to port.

But I'm realistic, it's not going to happen because the selling points for the console hardware is wrapped up in companies' brand identity also. It's unfortunate because that's largely what's keeping the "gaming is for kids" mentality as well as limiting the realistic application and broadening of ratings of the ESRB. People don't blame the dvd player for its ability to play porn, but they would blame the console manufacturer if it could play porn games I bet.

[djotefsoup]

I think people also radically overestimate how many people have access to any sort of high speed internet, especially without some sort of horrible usage cap.

There's nothing stopping the provider from caching the content and using their own servers for it. For my provider (internode) and a lot of other australian ones, even though you're still dealing with data caps as the norm around the country, lots of places now exclude their own game servers and their Steam cache from usage quotas.

[steve]

I think the majority of console gamers are still not online in any meaningful way.
And 10-15 years ago, the Internet was a fad. And MMOs were a fad. And wireless devices were a fad.


And here you're not even just talking about playing games onilne, you're talking about delivering them specifically via online only. It's not going to happen as soon as you think.
Your cable company would probably say otherwise.

[John Many Jars]

With or without hardware, consoles are still gay

[mkozlows]

Care to bet on that? It won't be the next gen, but I'd wager that the next gen will make online connectivity so accessible that we'll end up with a majority of consoles online, and online purchasing will become an option even for new, full-price games. And I wouldn't be surprised if, the generation after that, at least one of the console makers has digital purchasing of content as their main feature, and the primary way to get games.

If I'm reading your "nexts" right, you're making a prediction for download primacy in, what, 2025? (Assuming next gen in 2013 and six years a gen.)

Apparently Dave still disagrees with you, but based on where we were in 1993 compared to now, I think you could just as well argue that everyone in 2025 will just network their phone into their holo-goggles and game on those. 2025 is the crazy-ass future, and who knows what people there will do?

[MattKeil]

I think we're a very long way from where the masses buy games online only for their TVs. Very, very long way...

Yes. And let's do remember that this is the same company who, in 2002 or so, was running E3 videos predicting that all mainstream online gaming would be done via PlayOnline by this time. How's that working out for you, Square?

[Chris Nahr]

What I'd like them to do in the next generation or two is come up with a tightly bound parameters of a common standard for hardware and playback functionality so the silly hardware wars can be over.

How is that going to work economically? Both Sony and Microsoft have been eating billion-dollar losses on their hardware. They only do that for the sake of software royalties. That model would break down when consoles could be cloned like PCs.

Standardized hardware has to be profitable on its own. Since high launch prices don't seem to work so well, you can expect the performance level of netbooks or the Wii -- i.e. cheap slow hardware that's profitable at low prices. That's not what I want for my console gaming.

[BigWeather]

I think much of it (at least in the US) depends on which way providers go with respect to capping bandwidth. We've seen some aborted attempts by TimeWarner and Comcast to do it in certain markets but at some point it may come.

[unbongwah]

Physical media simply has more capacity.
As the old adage goes, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of <insert physical media here>." Used to be "CDs," then "DVDs," now "Blu-rays." EDIT: storage capacity has always and will for the foreseeable future greatly outstrip network bandwidths.

And here you're not even just talking about playing games onilne, you're talking about delivering them specifically via online only. It's not going to happen as soon as you think.
Which may be why Wada says, "In ten years' time," not "next month." Which is far enough into the future that he can crow about his prediction if he's right and pretend he never said it if he's wrong in a decade.