Xbox 360 and PS3 are ”refreshing now” with Kinect and Move, and we’ll get ”another box” from each, but what after that? Consoles ‘constrain’.
”It’s been a long time since a major console shipped,” said Tom Dubois of OnLive. ”They’re all kind of refreshing now, with Kinect and Move and so on. But what are they going to do next?” The next major console release is predicted for 2012-ish.
”We’re gonna get another box, but after that, do we need boxes anymore? The bandwidth at homes is gonna be there, the cost of computing continue to decrease…” OnLive does in fact have a ‘microconsole’ that’s coming which hooks up to TVs, but this is little more than a video decoder really they say, and could eventually become standard in TVs.
”The TV and some sort of controller, and you’re good to go,” muses Dubois.
”Game designers have been constrained by the platform and the hardware; if you think about a game designed for the cloud, it’s a different exercise.” The cloud-platform consists of numerous servers doing all the hard work and then uploading the end product to you the gamer at home, removing the need for powerful consumer hardware.
”You could design a game that ran on multiple servers, used tons of memory, could be 500-person multiplayer… The constraints are removed.” Right now the cloud-platform is still in its infancy with many put off by lack of high speed broadband infrastructure.
Are the next sets of boxed home consoles going to be the last?
