If publishers start signing deals then many games could be played "for free somewhere". Microtransactions and subscriptions are the future.
"It could happen this fall if we can get the deal put together with Activision, quite frankly. Are you listening Bobby?" Castle told Eurogamer in an interview, floating the idea of Treyarch's Black Ops instalment as browser friendly.
"When I joined InstantAction a year ago, I was expecting major upheaval within that year, and it hasn't happened yet," he said. Castle left EA last year.
"But the signs of it happening are getting more and more frequent and closer and closer to the bone, as it were. I don't even think it's five years out. I think it's just a few years out. In my worst-case scenario it would be five years."
"In my best-case scenario for the consumer, it's happening within a year, maybe two. You'll see almost everybody prefer to go play the game for free somewhere, download it incrementally and buy it in pieces or through some other microtransaction, than the few people that will actually go to the Best Buys, GameStops and Wal-Marts of the world."
This future that Castle predicts would certainly suit Activision's Bobby Kotick who's just dreaming of the day he can operate a subscription based service for Call of Duty. Less outright purchases and a more piece meal approach is our industries future?
"They all want it," Castle added. "In fairness to the publishers, our system, we just launched it with Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition. We changed everything about InstantAction. We built it upon the base we had before. I think those are some of the issues they're concerned about: can we go to scale?"
"These are precious gems they have. I understand why nobody wants to put their brand out there unless they're absolutely certain it's going to work and it's going to be a great consumer experience. It's thrust upon us."
"It's incumbent upon us to prove to them that it can work." OnLive is now all systems go in the US and is the first major step in the cloud platform future that everyone who's involved is screeching about. Subscriptions - should they be limited to MMOs?
