Too Human’s Denis Dyack has been pondering the Cloud platform, and he believes there won’t be just ”one cloud in the sky” but hundreds of OnLives and Gaikais.
The Silicon Knights founder admits it ”might all go horribly,” but that would only delay its inevitable rise a little. In two decades time the cloud platform ”will be the dominant model.”
Denis Dyack airs his views at this year’s GDC, in his keynote entitled ‘Musing about Cloud’, reports GamesIndustry.biz. With this system in place ”it’ll be easier for you as a developer to bring your game to market,” and help combat the rise in marketing costs too.
”Don’t assume there will just be one cloud in the sky - there will be hundreds,” he noted.
”Assuming Silicon Knights had the resources we could have a cloud. Sony could have one, Nintendo could have one, Microsoft could have one. I think about clouds like cable channels, there’ll be hundreds.” Currently OnLive and Gaikai are the only contenders.
”I think that’s likely where it will go, because it’s an accepted consumer model already.”
The greatest obstacle and threat to the Cloud platform is latency, but Dyack dismisses the issue as time will help overcome infrastructure problems, and it wouldn’t adversely affect every game anyway. The end result is the end to consoles, with the rise of services in their place.
”If I was to look back in ten years at how 2009 was remembered, I think it would be as the end of the golden era of videogames of coin-ops and consoles,” as the first Clouds unveiled.
”This kind of talk for me really isn’t speaking about what Silicon Knights is going to do, more about what’s in store for the industry,” he said. ”These things don’t happen overnight, but in small steps. It might all go horribly, and we don’t see another cloud model for four more years - but I do think in 20 years that cloud will be the dominant model.”
Ever rising broadband speeds for countries means the Cloud platform is best placed for the future, and we all just love our Internet. Consoles extinct by 2029?
