We’ve all been taking for granted that gaming companies like Nintendo will always have a new console or piece of hardware to peddle towards us. Each year at trade shows like GDC and E3, every console manufacturer and their mum go on stage to show us the newest peripheral, and perhaps a hint or two of the next platform to look forward to. The one that will have massive graphical breakthroughs, crystal-clear audio, and perhaps a new feature nobody ever knew they wanted but suddenly become addicted to.
But what would happen if it all suddenly stopped?
The death of the gaming console. Imagine it for a moment—no more hardware updates, with cutely-named graphics chips or CPU cores. No big fancy glowing box to proudly sit under the TV. No expensive device that needs to be manufactured, warehoused, distributed, and given tech support if it fails. But then… what would replace it?
The cloud. For years now, people have been shouting from the rooftops that the end is nigh. That game companies will offload the graphical muscle from little TV boxes to impressive supercomputers they can stick in freezers and power with Pandora-mined unobtanium, then stream the output as video to gamers who just have a little low-powered receiver that hooks to their TV. With services such as OnLive just at the cusp of making this a widespread reality, such techno-religious fanatics finally have something to show for their blatherings.
But is it enough to kill the console market as we know it?
My argument is “no”. At least, not for a good decade or two. Cloud-based gaming computing may be “the way of the future”, but I don’t think it will be the new face of console gaming just yet. While there have been no concrete announcements of a Wii², Xbox 720, or PlayStation 4, I highly doubt any of them will utilize a cloud for game processing. Looking to OnLive—while it is still quite an impressive milestone in its own right, it is still plagued by video artifacting simply because there just isn’t enough bandwidth to go around—thus the necessity of video compression.
Then why is the current console generation lasting so long? It is true that this generation we are on is having a much longer lifespan than ever before. But it’s not because there is no more consoles in line. It’s because gamers just aren’t as demanding for hardware upgrades as they have been before.
Think about it—The jump from the Atari 2600 to the NES was huge. The next leap to the Genesis and the SNES was also big. Then came the leap to 3D, which the PS1 and N64 did an adequate job of, but gamers still wanted more than blocky characters. PS2, GameCube, and Xbox brought 3D to a level that looked fairly realistic. The current generation brought it to a whole new level of shine.
But then what? What’s next? A few more levels of anti-aliasing? You can’t bump the resolution up, 1080p is as high as TVs go right now. You can’t up the number of colors on them, either. Sure, you can increase the poly count, maybe have a few more on-screen particle effects. But at the end of the day, the discernible upgrades that the average gamer will notice is dwindling. There are marginal diminishing returns for graphics hardware compared to the visual effect on people.
And that’s the reason why we don’t have a newer set of consoles just yet. People paid through the nose for their PS3’s, and they aren’t quite so willing to plunk down another $600 for the next wave a few years later if it’s not going to have as noticeable an upgrade as before. As an example, I’ve talked to enough people who aren’t interested in a Blu-Ray player as they find the upgrade over DVDs is trivial, even on 1080p displays—why pay for a premium they don’t value?
So does this all make home gaming consoles obsolete? Not just yet. There is still a demand for hardware that isn’t completely dependent on an online service. Speaking for myself, I will not buy into a service that is totally dependent on them existing to access my games unless there were no other available solutions. I like owning physical hardware. I like the idea of going back and playing older classics without paying for them again. Because it’s physical and I have it in front of me to run on hardware sitting on my desk. Even with Steam and Xbox Live Arcade I can download all the games then go offline if the distribution networks are shut down.
And what of people with poor internet connections? People in rural Wyoming can still play Final Fantasy XIII just as well as someone in Silicon Valley or New York City. We certainly couldn’t have the same thing if games went fully internet-dependent. Even though a good percentage of gamers do have broadband, and some companies may settle for leaving behind potential customers with poor internet solutions, consoles today can still penetrate to get anyone with a TV and live power outlets.
OnLive has given us a tremendous glimpse into what could very well be the future of gaming. While it’s true that they have successfully created a cloud-based gaming technology that can turn a meager setup into a powerhouse, the next generation of game consoles having nothing to fear. There still needs to be a PlayStation 4, and perhaps another console after that. It’s just going to take a little longer for the current investments in technology to pay off before anyone’s ready to make the next jump.