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Ubisoft CEO: Cloud Gaming Will Replace Consoles After the Next Generation (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Better start saving up for that PlayStation 5, Xbox Two, or Nintendo Swatch (that last follow-up name idea is a freebie, by the way). That generation of consoles might be the last one ever, according to Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. After that, he predicts cheap local boxes could provide easier access to ever-evolving high-end gaming streamed to the masses from cloud-based servers. "I think we will see another generation, but there is a good chance that step-by-step we will see less and less hardware," Guillemot said in a recent interview with Variety. "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."
So here we go again. Anyone think it will actually work this time?
Yawn... someone predicts this every single generation of consoles.
The only reason that hardware is becoming less important is because it hasn't been improving fast enough. It used to be that everything was obsolete within 3 years, but now set hardware can function well for 5, and in the future, it's lifetime will extend further. If Moore's Law weren't dying, console hardware would remain important.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
You will pay us fees to access the same content, forever and ever and ever.
Just like cell phones and tablets were going to kill consoles FOREVER!
Oh, and all that just after consoles were going to kill PCs FOREVER.
Oh, and just before that the opposite was true. Actually, that one kind of oscillates. FOREVER!
People seek experiences that are new to them. None of these technologies actually subsume ALL of the features of the previous as much as any of these stories indicates.
Just like single-player is going to kill multiplayer, and vice versa every couple of years, it's all just empty fashion mentality speaking - not any actual kind of trend that can be extended.
Ryan Fenton
Wasn't the PS3/XB360/Wii supposed to be the last generation of console before streaming? I think especially with the Japanese market that as long as you can't economically stream a game over cell towers, we're still going to have the ability to purchase physical games.
Streaming games might be dandy for flight sims or RTS but any game that's sensitive to latency will be complete shit.
Seriousely Ubisoft? Youâ(TM)re gonna run cloud gaming on your potato servers?
Wow!
I can pay a small fee for internet access, which enables me to pay a small fee to rent a console, which allows me to pay a small fee to pay a small fee to play a game, for another small fee I can purchase items in the game, how can I lose?
overpaid bullshit.
Consoles are not going to be "replaced" by cloud game streams. It's not surprising that this CEO has forgotten that there are many gamers, all over the world, who do not have access to high-speed internet connections that are required for an online-only service. An average console generation is approximately 5 years. We are not 5 years away from ubiquitous high-speed internet connections in rural and undeveloped areas of the world.
Microsoft tried making this mistake with the X-Box One, and they were so short-sighted that they almost went to market with it, before they realized that by making their console online-only they will deny themselves many thousands of valuable customers.
Cloud game streams will evolve as a subscription model to supplement (and for some people) replace the gaming console. Just like Netflix supplements cable television for many, and replaces it for some.
Eventually we may have cable set-top boxes or television sets with the "Xbox" app and the "Playstation" app and the "Nintendo" app built into them so that we can download and play games through these boxes instead of buying a dedicated console. However, consoles will still be necessary and still exist for the people who want to take their gaming with them on the road, or when they deploy overseas, or if they live in an area without broadband.
Nintendo Switch is already next generation. Wii U was the PS4 and Xbox One. Wii was PS3 and 360. GameCube was PS2 and Xbox. So there is no "saving up", if you have a Nintendo Switch you are already on a next generation console.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
FarCry 5 looked great in Youtube promos, but is the most simple, repetitive, dumbed down, soulless and unenjoyable FarCry ever made. Even the story is terrible. Now this CEO is probably chums with Microsoft's current "Cloudmaniac" CEO. They must have played Golf together and decided "Lets make really terrible AAA games, charge lots of dough for them and put them all in the cloud!"
There'll be vintage games. There'll be the latest you can stream. And there'll be a boatload of "server no longer available" in between.
I could see more games being like Diablo 3, where chunks of the game logic was done on the server end and then passed back to the local client, but there's just no way a fully streamed system would work for many games.
So they found a way to ignore the laws of physics?
Current consoles already have a lag problem. With wireless controllers, a TV that does all sort of processing to the image before displaying it, all of this is adding a small amount of delay that is already perceptible.
Adding the delay of sending the actions I do on my controller to the server over the internet and receiving the generated frames to display on the TV will add way too much lag.
But the younger generation seems to be unaware of the growing lag problem in the current world. It seems to me that as more and more of our technology is being driven by software instead of hardware, everything responds slowly to inputs. It used to be that changing a TV channel or changing volume was almost instantaneous, now you wait half a second for the damn thing to respond to your button press. I'm so tired of having to deal with laggy unresponsive touch screens, it's spreading like cancer in the technological world.
Now get off my lawn!
Try it! Library of Babel
Why would game company’s shell out billions to build giant gaming centres all across the country when gamers are already willing to pay for the hardware themselves?
And really physics is against them data can only move so fast, as anyone who has tried Steam's in house streaming can testify that is going to depend on the game. A lot of games like simulation or strategy games will work fine over a very low latency network. But just as many games, as in every first person shooter, the slight delay between mouse input and reaction is very real and noticeable.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
Cloud gaming will end gaming sales after next generation.
Just how many times do we the consumer have to tell companies this.
We do NOT want devices that need to be online all the time to work!!
High speed and reliable internet connections are a fantasy for a large percentage of us.
Even if they could somehow solve the latency problem to make regular games playable, it still wouldn't be fast enough for VR. VR still needs local rendering hardware no matter what.
So, let me get this straight, in the near future I'm going to have a terminal that sends the input from my controller to the cloud and I receive back a high-quality FHD or UHD stream without any noticeable lag... by magic?
And hit your download cap how fast?
So we have this special "game mode" in TVs to reduce processing delay to a minimum, but at the same time we expect to stream the game video from the cloud, at 10's to 100's ms RTT plus additional video encoding and decoding delay?
Makes perfect sense to me...
... but it certainly no longer is. If you see the insane amounts of CPU usage for browsers executing tons of JavaScript, decoding video, rendering 3D graphics - I doubt that you can still call them "thin".
Not only will the use not own anything and pay per use, Ubisoft will also collect all kinds of data from him and make him watch Ads until he barfs.
My cable company broadband is really shitty with respect to online gaming. It has way too many "micro outages" that cause me to get dropped from most any on-line game.
First, Nintendo has stated that they intend the Switch to last 7 to 10 years. It's 15 months into that life cycle.
He's overestimating how well gamers will tolerate being pushed into a business model very similar to Adobe CreativeCloud, with the added "features" of microtransactions and pay-to-win. Gaming is not a profession, it's recreation; as such, the market's perception of "necessary" is different.
Then again, as much as gamers say they hate EA, they still put up with EA's skulduggery.
This proclamation is about the potential to capture user data in a mandatory controlled environment, not hardware specs or anything about games themselves.
Absolutely ridiculous statement. Just lok at Virginia!
Something about this doesn't quite sound right.
I'm assuming there's a reason those empty boxes only only a "download the game at ______" are still showing up in wal-mart etc. I assume contractual obligations to the retail stores (otherwise there would just be a poster ad for the game or a voucher with a key you pickup. Why bother with a physical box?).
Just my speculation, obviously: I would guess Ubisoft (probably in connection with other developers/publishers) are negotiating their terms with the likes of gamestop etc. This is about the time of year conversations would have to start about what's going in to retail for the fall/holiday season. By having an article like this released talking up the advantages of streaming games with low end, generic hardware this guy is effectively making a rude hand gesture at some still powerful retail chains. I bet he's just trying to get the best price for promotion versus money spent shipping physical items. By singing of the praises of game streaming he's telling the retailers he doesn't need them.
In fact it wouldn't surprise me if in reality he hasn't even contemplated what the landscape will be for retail gaming in in 2028. He's just trying to get better/cheaper terms with the retailers. The negotiations just happened to have spilled out into public.
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
A: How do you PAY for this? No one seems to be able to answer that. It's been six+ years now since "Cloud Gaming" has been the future and no one can answer how to get gamers to pay for this stuff. It might make sense for some corporations, but after a two years of heavy gaming on an Amazon instance you'll pay as much as a decent gaming PC of your own, let alone the price of a console.
B: You can't play VR games on the cloud. You just can't. The lag would make you throw up a thousand times over. And VR is ripe for a huge mass market expansion. It can be awesome by yourself, even better at a party (surprisingly enough) and is barely just scratching multiplayer. Get the cost down from a good gaming PC + $500 to say, just a console price, and it could take off. But not on the cloud, because the lag is far too much, even on a landline to a nearby server, for that to work.
Businessmen who don't know anything about Cloud cost structure or engineering have been predicting dumb terminals with centralized computing for 30 years now. Hasn't happened yet, even the modern Cloud is just used to run massive, occasional use server stuff rather than any sort of day to day end user experience.
I don't think this has anything to do with better gameplay or cheaper hardware or anything like that, I think it has more to do with them having more control over every aspect of the games. If none of it lives on anything local to you, then you have no control over it. Also: games as a service, instead of as a product. More renting things, less (or abolition of) actually owning a copy of a game. Or worse: you 'buy' a 'copy' of it, but it's 100% digital, and they can revoke it anytime they feel like it, and you have no say in the matter. You know, like e-books and digital music and digital-only copies of movies and TV shows?
Seriously, fuck 'the cloud'.
I've been beta-testing this GeForce NOW cloud gaming thing from Nvidia. It's terrific. I can play the latest AAA games on an old potato with everything on high or ultra. I'm not joking. I can play games that were never released for Mac on my wife's Macbook Pro. Even games where I don't meet anywhere near the minimum requirements. No lag, no stuttering. Multiplayer games. FPS games. Racing games. Works flawlessly for me. The beta forums have people saying they're getting lag on PUBG or Fortnite but I haven't seen it.
The only catch is that you need a fast internet connection with pretty much zero packet loss and jitter. I had some problems at first and I thought it might be Geforce Now, but after bugging the hell out of my ISP they replaced some wire and skipped over some old splitters and now I have this fast, pristine connection and there's no AAA game I can't play. It still remains to be seen how much they're gonna charge for this service when the time comes, but I'm honestly getting a little tired of updating my system every 2 years to play the latest games, so it might be worth it to me.
Also, cloud gaming uses a shit-ton of bandwidth, so if you have data caps, it might not be for you. But cloud gaming is absolutely awesome. Will it eventually replace games running on local machines? It might. Probably not any time soon, especially since not all publishers are participating. For example, while GeForce NOW supports just about anything on Steam, they don't support Origin games yet. Probably because they're planning to set up their own cloud gaming service.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Gamers are buying hyper polling keyboards, 10 zillion dpi mice, sub MS 4k *sync monitors and VR.
Meanwhile Ubisoft is busy finding new ways to render itself irrelevant. Good job.
.......
South Park summed it up best: FAGS!
Sell customers thin clients that connects to Cloud computing resources and stream the game.
Sure will prevent piracy, you don't even have the hardware anymore. Forget 'jailbreaking' or otherwise tampering with their console, all you got is basically a lame Chromebook.
Oh and forget forking over your payment and getting a console. This baby will be subscription based, like EVERYTHING is turning into. This last point I'm still on the fence of it being good or bad, there's some nice pros to subscriptions.
But you know, no internet, no gaming for you.
1% of the people work (probably).
50% spend their time shuffling letters around on the screen
30% spend their time commanding others what to do
the rest spend their day staring at their screens
To put it another way:
McKhaos: this guy asks me
McKhaos: how many people work in your company ?
McKhaos: my answer
McKhaos: about a third
The position of this story is really ironic: right after a story about how 30% of West Virginia doesn't have internet access. Not just broadband. They don't have any internet access at all. And he really thinks streaming is ready to replace consoles?
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
I, for one, am looking forward to getting subscribed to our Cloud Overlords and stream Dwarf Fortress in h265.
How are we going to handle interference from subspace quantum singularities?
I hope and pray I will be able to keep my old Atari 520 STF.
I don't want to send it in the trash.
No more dusting off your Half-Life or Legend of Zelda disc for a replay with internet-hosted game processing - you wanna play you gotta pay. Monthly.
Add the death of second hand sales and piracy - can't crack the game if you have no access to the game's binaries or libraries - and what's not to love from the perspective of a scumfuck executive?
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When I was younger I was told we'd all be driving flying cars by now. I wonder how many people buy and play console/PC games vs how many people will have a good enough broadband connection to stream that service. And with net neutrality gone how much extra you'd have to pay for a lag free experience. In the last 16 years my internet connection has gone from 33.6kbps to 7mbps. With the last 10 years being stagnant at 7. Given the release schedule of consoles I think UBI's ambition is slightly higher in expectation than reality. I expect there will be demand for localized gaming systems well into the future.
While by far a pipe dream for apparently the same reason as everything these days, politics, if you had a municipal dark fiber network it would be possible to have uncompressed video streams go over the fiber to your home over various light frequency channels. Light travels down fiber (depending on frequency) at about 204m/us. There are 1,000us in 1ms. So as long as the physical facility is within 100km of your home, something easily achieved with existing fiber transceivers to the home without regeneration nor amplification, the round trip added should be just under 1ms to very small fractions of 1ms, which is plenty responsive. Of course the only way you are going to be able to do what you want with the fiber to your home and even be allowed to run multiple light frequencies for just your home / apartment is if it is a municipal fiber network that allowed you to do what you want and connect to who you wanted to. The current telco incumbents seem bent on milking inferior cabling for all it is worth with a bent of trying to cram their obsolete services down your throat for added profit, so no vision to allow for such a thing.
There are a lot of potential benefits to co-locating all of the hardware you could and renting on demand as opposed to owning. Maybe you can't afford the floor space to a whole computer setup, but can afford the money to co-locate. Maybe you have small children who will use the vents on your fancy computer hardware to pour their drinks into (or an animal that hates on your computer setup) and such things get expensive quick. Maybe you don't live in the best neighborhood and thieves can't steal what is not physically there. Maybe you only have a few hours a week to actually use your stationary computer setup and so it makes more sense to rent time than to buy a machine; you just need super low latency only offered by uncompressed video.
I suppose there is also the chance that going up to 144Hz, you won't notice the lag of compression at all granted again that you have a municipal provider that will allow you to go at say 1Gb/s unmetered to a localized gaming service. Even at 60Hz, I find FPS games are very playable, just a slight bit of lag taking the very edge of possible off. There is a certain point where if the total latency is low enough, you simply will not notice at all as every human body and brain has a significant inherent lag, so every last ms does not actually count, just too many count as in getting too far outside what the brain will consider inherent lag and thus naturally compensate. So for example 15ms of total lag from finger twitching against the controller to display refresh will not be noticed by anyone, but 40ms will be noticed by many and 100+ms will not only be noticed, but start to really screw some people up.
An opinion from the company behind Uplay is irrelevant.
Challenge = cancer