'Consoles are going away' after the next gen, says David Jaffe
Games will simply be streamed to your TV, or so thinks the God of War creator.
The next generation of consoles will mark the end of dedicated gaming machines, David Jaffe believes.
The God of War creator reckons that within 10 years games will have become services that are pipelined to your TV.
"Look, consoles are going away," Jaffe told Gamesindustry.biz. "I think in 10 years - probably sooner, but 10 years is always the safe thing to say so you don't sound like an idiot - but here's what I'll say: I'll go on the record and say that the next generation of hardware will be the last consoles. And they should be.
"It doesn't mean you won't buy a piece of hardware from Sony, but you'll probably buy a television that streams the stuff. And you'll still have Sony, loud and proud and strong making these great, big, epic games like God of War and Uncharted, and they'll be making great little games like Sound Shapes, but they'll become more like movie studios for video games.
"I'll be able to stream in the next Uncharted and Plants vs Zombies and you won't even think about it. It'll just be like I can watch a public access show on my TV or I can watch Avatar."
With typical colour, Jaffe also acknowledged that his views are more or less just a hunch.
"I'm going to go out on a limb, because why the f**k not? I don't care if I'm wrong, I'm not a business guy. I think next-gen consoles are going to do 40 percent of [the sales volume] of the current gen hardware.
"The asteroid has hit the Earth, the dust cloud is covering the sun and the dinosaurs are on the way out - but not the games! We'll always have great games and bleeding edge graphics... it's just going to be a new delivery mechanism."
User Comments
Endless@ Woffls
In theory consoles will still exist, but they wont be in our homes. Because a specific set of hardware will still be required to hardness the full power. Otherwise you still have the directX dilemma.
Woffls
Firstly, these devices are the most capable and broadly versatile on the electronics market aside from a computer. Microsoft are moving to generic Xbox branding, and putting all kinds of services in the box. Sony have crammed their consoles in the same way, and Nintendo are as well.
They have enormous potential because the user base is very enthusiastic, and will always ensure there's about 5 million sales out the gate for a new platform as long as the supply is there.
I think it's more likely that games consoles will evolve into generic media and computing devices, but what we call them in ten years is another discussion. Incidentally, Jaffe will probably use that as a get-out and just be all like "yeah man, I TOLD you we wouldn't have "games consoles"".
Streaming is REALLY far away from being mass market, but the good thing about it is that the service is entirely scalable, so it's not like Gaikai is investing in making a hardware platform and hoping it sells 20m units. They've built the technology already and when the customers turn up, they can just buy more servers to cope with it. I think it's a sustainable business model, but I don't know if they'll get much of a return for a while.
munkee