EA Founder Predicts Consoles Coming To a Close
It’s hard not to admit that a heated battle currently exists behind the walls of the gaming industry among the hardware giants. We’ve all witnessed the tug-of-war shared between the big three – Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony – as they fight over our wallets to claim the bigger slice of the pie chart in sales. One of the tactics used to entice gamers towards brand dedication is through the marketing of console exclusives. Microsoft flexed their guns with Halo, and Sony answered back with the Killzone franchise and many others. As entertaining as it is to see the competition, one significant industry figure believes that this console war will come to an end.
Trip Hawkins, one of the founding fathers of Electronic Arts, shared his thoughts about the future of console gaming with an online episode of Game Theory. He said that developers will need to build games for multiple platforms to sustain themselves within the evolving industry. Such a direction will bring an end to console dominance and exclusives as well. Instead of consoles, gaming will be performed via a Cloud network on multiple devices.
“For much of the history of the industry, it was a winner takes all, single platform model. Clearly it’s never going to be that way again.
“In the future, any kind of game company will have to have a technology approach that gives them agility across platform boundaries. That’s going to play into where gaming needs to go, which is to become like SAS – or Software as A Service – where customers are going to the Cloud, where they have an account and where they have virtual items and they can play.
“But they might come in from a variety of different devices. It’s going to be about simplicity and convenience and making that model work.”
Hawkins words may seem novel, but he isn’t the only person that shares the same opinion. A few months ago, well-renowned game developer, Hideo Kojima, had voiced the same belief. Although when Kojima had shared his remarks, not many shared enthusiasm for his outlook. However, a quick peek into the entertainment biz already shows that more content is becoming available to people’s homes via digital streaming (i.e. movies and music). Perhaps, this is the direction that Hawkins and Kojima are seeing within the evolution of gaming. Now that two major players of the business have come forward with similar ideas, perhaps this means this change in the industry may come sooner than we expect.
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15 Responses to “EA Founder Predicts Consoles Coming To a Close”
so if you don’t have good internet service you’re screwed…I don’t have any issue but I’m sure there will be millions who do. Think of all the console users right now who probably don’t even have their systems online, it may not be a lot, but there are still some out there. I can see this working in 20 years, but not in the next decade.
Talking out their ass as usual. Consoles arent going anywhere anytime soon. Its really not even an argument.
Cloud gaming is the future but right now we will have to live with consoles. And right now multi-platform is the way to make money. Look at Bungie leaving the arms of Microsoft to go Multi-platform, IW wanted to go in a different direction but Kotick nixed that and fired the two founders for it.
At some time in the future exclusivity for consoles will be limited to those studios owned by the console makers themselves. Publishers like EA, Activison and others will have to go multi-platform because there will be a large drop in available money for gaming if the world economy starts to slide into Depression.
I don’t think this will happen anytime soon, because look at the PSPgo. Sure, the lack luster sales of the Go could of been because you couldn’t transfer your old titles to it, but I don’t believe we will have digital games delivery service to our homes for at least another decade.
I like a hard copy of my games, thank you.
I’m not saying this wont ever happen, but its obviously not gonna happen anytime soon. Eliminating consoles and “going to the cloud” will be alienating millions of people who still dont have internet or internet thats fast enough. Especially if the service of which he speaks of will be something like onlive.
I think the gaming market is big enough to have 3 major players. Heck, about 15 years ago there was alot of companies in this “console war” simultaneously. Atari with the Jaguar, Panasonic with the 3do, Neo Geo, Sega, Nintendo, Sony, Philips cd-i etc. Most failed due to their own bad business decisions, and expensive price tag. I wouldnt be surprised if another big company like Apple or Google jumped into the console gaming business. Anyway, these console wars, races or whatever arent going away anytime soon.
one more thing…I can see the industry pushing for this because they are constantly trying to eliminate any used games market, but I don’t think they are thinking of the actual impact eliminating used games would have. They want everyone to buy new but that isn’t going to increase sales upon release. Either more people will start renting, waiting for prices to decrease, or will just have to buy a lot fewer games overall because the thickness of people’s wallets isn’t going to change just because the industry giants don’t want to lose out on the money in the used market. This will probably lead to the downfall of a bunch of smaller studios/publishers/etc. because the only games that people on a small budget will buy are the AAA titles with a huge marketing campaign.
Hey, I didn’t buy a PS3 to play games, I bought a PS3 to play PS3 games.
Nuff said.
i agree that we will see an end to the way we buy games going from going to gamestop to get a disc with data on it to just downloading games off line but i don’t see an end to console wars i mean if it isn’t about space like a blue ray disc it will be about the processor and cpu
It will all be a part of Skynet in the not too distant future…
1) consoles aren’t going any where i doubt you’ll see nintendo or sony or ms give up the fight and stop making consoles. consoles are more popular than ever, look at the past 3 consoles where the ps2 sold almost tripple the gamecube and the xbox combined , the sales are alot more even atm.
2) physical media isn’t going any where. look at games like gt5 and gow3. do you really want to be downloading games that are like 50gb big or depend on your internet service to stream a game? there are still places with out broadband internet how would they play games on a cloud service? the average gamer could care less about a cloud system and just want to go to there local game store and pick up the latest call of duty or madden.
they keep saying this is what they want , but it won’t happen, no matter how much they want it.
Ugh.
I didn’t buy a PS3 to play games, I bought a PS3 to play PS3 games.
Nuff said.
How do people not have internet? It’s 2010.
Seriously, how we are going to ever get teleportation and flying cars if there are people who can’t get online by now? Color me baffled.
hello …
it is bound to happen in a distant future … but for now:
- the Internet is not ready
- the gamers are not ready
- the developers are not ready
- the console manufacturers are not ready …
- i’m not ready …
* to deliver that fast
* to do download that takes ages before getting into the fun & lose the ownership effect
* to re-encode / compress games to make them good for all bandwidth & lose some quality
* to drop their consoles … their money making machines LOL
* to stop dreaming of very high quality games / movies / etc on high capacity discs i can touch!
cheers!
Cloud gaming may happen within the next decade, but that doesn’t mean consoles are going away, or that the “console war” is going to end. It’d be sad if it did, because its what causes these companies to come up with better hardware on a regular basis.
@Richy – right on. Think about having GOW3 in a cloud – you know how long it’d take to download that? At the moment, its completely ludicrous.
@nootfloosh – its called living in the middle of nowhere. There are areas of the country where you can’t get it because it simply isn’t worth the money for ISPs to run their lines out there. Also, some people are poor, but not too poor to buy some video games for their kids.
It’s typical for people who are in charge of corporations to dream about how much more money they could make if only it wasn’t for all that darned competition they’re constantly faced with.