EA founder Trip Hawkins has commented on the idea that in the future, game developers will have to cross “platform boundaries” to succeed, and games will be playable via multiple devices – marking the end of the console exclusive;
“For much of the history of the industry, it was a winner takes all, single platform model. Clearly it’s never going to be that way again.
In the future, any kind of game company will have to have a technology approach that gives them agility across platform boundaries. That’s going to play into where gaming needs to go, which is to become like SAS – or Software as a Service – where customers are going to the Cloud, where they have an account and where they have virtual items and they can play.
But they might come in from a variety of different devices. It’s going to be about simplicity and convenience and making that model work.”
Cloud based gaming is somewhat of a contentious issues with most people. Whilst in theory it can work – as OnLive has proven – broadband infrastructure would need to be vastly improved to be able to handle HD gaming. Then there is the issue of a gamer effectively just renting a game, rather than owning – this has been one of the loudest and most common gripes. Can these be overcome? It won’t be an easy task.
Source: CVG
hazelam
they’d love that wouldn’t they, so we never actually get to own any of the games we buy, which means we can never trade them in and they can at will just take them away and we wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing about it.
give me a box or give me death, though at a pinch i might settle for a download.
bunimomike
Pretty much with you on this one. I want choice (download or purchase). I’ve just bought Ace Combat for the Xbox and it was £18. I just don’t think I would’ve bought it if I couldn’t offload it in two weeks time for a half decent amount of money.
bajere
yep, not only do i like choice, i like the idea of playing a game i have purchased!!! using this dumb ass method means that i wont be able to boot my PS3 up 15 years down the line and play a game as the servers will be off?!?! I still like playing Streets of Rage or RoadRash on my megadrive, and no doubt ill still like booting up UC2 or ModNation in years to come.
TSBonyman
So it’ll be goodbye innovation – hello generic games system..
Bilbo_bobbins
HA HA, A loooooong way off for this to happen, if it ever does. A lot of people will always want something physical to buy, whether or not they like it. They would love for this to happen, less cost for them and more money. OF course they want it and “think” it will happen. Any who, the whole of the UK broadband will need upgrading for anything like this to happen, which, according to the government, will not be anytime soon.
bajere
I think the PSPgo is a good way of viewing the digital only way…as you said, people want physical things, big reason the go is a failure. I think the ONLY way that digital only gaming will work is either the game has no physical counter part so we don’t have a choice but to download, or (and i cant see this happing one bit) the digi-games come out at such a low cost, ie £10-£15, that people just download it and only splash out £40 on the big AAA titles so they get the disk to collect.
amiga_dude
PSPGo is not failure because people don’t buy download content. PSPGo is failure as to expesive as a device.
Now people are downloading in there droves content for iPhone. Apple is making lot money from this. Now iPhone cost lot more then PSPGo but people belive it is a better option.
So people will buy download content, but they first have to own the device to download to. It a chicken and egg situation.
cc_star
The UK has been singled out by a variety of multi-national companies for having to weak a broadband infrastructure for them to launch here. We’re punching well below our weight when it comes to speed, but the quality is even worse than speed.
It’s a poor show with absolutely no sign of changing
cc_star
We had the Naughty Dog founder speaking out last week that the business model surrounding AAA games is unsustainable. Apart from a few key franchises, I can see the mid-term future being incredibly lo-fi, this will aid the adoption of cloud based systems over poor infrastucture, and of coutse the massive platform that is Facebook-alike gaming which all the massive players, EA, Google & Disney have just made hundreds of millions of pounds of investments in.
AG2297
Well that seems a bit contradictory to me. I read the Naughty Dog article, and im aware of the Farmville = more players than MW2 thing, but a big AAA such as MW2 made abosoloute heaps of profit! Way more than Farmville for example. If you look at Red Dead too, Rockstar didnt expect to make their development costs back but they did, and bloody quickly too. I can see why the AAA games would be unsustainable and it stand to reason and is logical that they would be, but the eveidence in profit and sales in most cases points to the opposite.
cc_star
Look at Blur, Singularity, Split/Second, Just Cause 2, Transformers, Lost Planet 2 and hundreds of games a year which only trouble the All Formats chart for a week or two, before disappearing well below a sea of Wii dance and/or fitness games (coincidently this is the same market MS are going after with Kinect, and people round here think they’re on to a loser).
Call Of Duty World at War is selling roughly the same amount of copies of these every week (yes W@W, still!!!)
Unless you have a mega-franchise like CoD, Halo, GTA, FIFA etc then spending $50m+ on developing a game is a very, very risky business and in a decade of belt tightening I can only see the situation worsening.
This isn’t terrible news however as perhaps some of these titles deserve not to be made (not necessarily the named ones above) and the development time would be better spent making smaller more creative (and importantly more affordable for gamers) titles for digital distribution.
This can help create new franchises of the future which could go on to be AAA games themselves, but without the initial unsustainable risk.
AG2297
Well while thats completely true, those games you mentioned arent making a sustainable amount of money, but I personally dont consider them AAA. I consider the COD’s, AC’s, GTA’s, HALO’s, MGS’s, UC’s etc (insert big console exclusive here) to be AAA these days. We have more games coming out than ever these days, and to me that demotes the games you mentioned down from AAA.
So when I say I think AAA’s do make a ton of profit, im very much talking about the top-of-their-game games. If were talking about the games you mentioned and similar games to them then I agree with you on that one.
I honestly dont know what Naughty Dog have got to worry about though, UC2 took almost every award going.
scavenga
I’m all for non-exclusive titles, but as far as the purchase itself goes, I’d never ever get a games system that was streaming only. Like Hazelam said, they could at will take it away again, and not being able to bring a game over to a mates’ or trade it in – or sell the console with games included if ever necessary – is just dire.
Defo not the way to go.
AnimaOnline
So long as there are multiple consoles on the market there will always be exclusive games. Whether third party exclusives will vanish all together I do not know but first party exclusives will always be there. Perhaps, if anything, a stronger focus on first party developers will be adopted in the future. Though the extinction of exclusive games altogether sounds a little unrealistic. There will always be a console which has a technical advantage, a business advantage or simply a developer who’s a fan of the system. The downloaded games market (XBLA, PSN) seems like a good example of exclusivity from third party developers.
cc_star
The Xbox Indie channel will help contribute to creating the Microsoft coders of the future, this will swell the talent pool for their way of doing development & importantly business in the future
KAMIKAZE-UK
I see the future of gaming like a sky subscription. You pay a monthly fee and play whatever you want, you play via a console like box that brings those games to you.
Severn2j
Releasing on as many platforms as possible is a good idea, it opens the game up to a much bigger market and is financially a smart move, but cloud-based gaming isn’t imo, its too open to exploitation by the publisher who will just use it to leverage as much money as possible out of the customer base. Call me oldschool, but I dont think openly screwing you customers over for what you can get is a sound financial move in the long run, despite what the Koticks and Patchers of the world might think..
cc_star
Releasing on as many platforms as possible massively increases your development costs and reduces your return on investment. With big franchises that outlay is recovered in increased sales, but that isn’t always the case. Probably why the 360 has got something like 80 more (full disc based retail) games not appearing on PS3 for it this year alone.
Total sales is irrelevant compared to profit.
If there was only one platform with the combined installbase of the PS360 , the increase in margin would be astronomical.
DJ Judas
So basically, future consoles will be PCs?
cc_star
Clever servers with dumb clients attached. However the trend of headimg towards camera based gameplay will have ti be reversed if the streamed gaming model is to take off because that would be too much upload traffic in comparison to joypad based commands
Foxhound_Solid
Console Exclusives will always, always be around….
That is a fact….. its what keeps the industry fresh and vibrant..
EA dude is wrong….