Perhaps you've heard recently about micro$oft and their cloud-oriented xbox strategy. This means you just need a thin client to display graphics rendered on the cloud and to handle the controller (pardon the pun). It's already rolling out.
What does this mean for the industry?
* M$ can undercut Nintendo & Sony by eliminating hardware requirements
* It's a pay-as-you-go model where individuals don´t own anything and basically rent games
* They can leverage their massive global cloud infra which the competition don´t have
* It's all about steady cash flows
I believe Sony would love to do this and have tried with seemingly little success - so far. The reason is we gamers tend to be horders and have insisted on physical copies. I believe future generations - who will almost certainly be poorer than us - will prefer to just rent games, especially since playstations are actually unnecessarily expensive.
And it's true... ps4 does remote streaming of ps3 games so it could foreseeably also stream ps5 games if the network can handle the resolution (which is a relatively easy problem). Of course Sony wants to ship playstations so they don't do this but they could.
People will say streaming is not fast enough for many games. I think games will evolve to the point where X milliseconds controller lag doesn´t give you a noticeable disadvantage. Games will become less fast and we won´t even notice. Indeed this happened with the Super Mario franchise when controllers went wireless. Try playing SMB3 world 8 with a wireless controller. You die. Super Mario Galaxy is fine though. Or maybe games will be a combination of cloud vs local processing, where minute interaction happen locally and fast. Just an idea. But I think networks will become fast enough.
And roms will effectively cease to exist.
I think m$ will be in a position of dominance soon and it's anyones guess what happens after that. We know everything they touch turns to shit. Their strategy scales extremely well and they have a serious advantage. It's a bit scary if you see value in competition.
What is a console?
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