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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.