Earlier this week THQ told the world they “don’t really have much sympathy” for those who buy pre-owned games and now they want to get rid of consoles altogether.
“I am a huge believer in the concept of Cloud computing – huge,” said THQ boss Brian Farrell, “The concept of lowering the entry barrier to consumers for gamers to get into our games by not having to shell out for the hardware is a tremendous potential opportunity.”
“Why do we need a $1,000 [console]… that’s what these boxes [or] consoles actually cost the manufacturers to make. Why do we need that computing power?”
The are many benefits of cloud gaming for publishers including zero piracy and no pre-owned market. For consumers the view is less rosy – no Internet connection means no gaming and you will only ever be renting the game, once your subscription ends you lose all rights to the games.
Source: GamesIndustryTV
Horned Cow
Yes, what ever you say THQ, now I’m going to play my beautiful PS3 and laugh at the fact that I literally haven’t and never will have a game published by THQ because they no title worth paying any thing near they charge.
cc_star
To be fair, I look forward to the death of the console.
The day I don’t have to go down the shops on launch day and part with £425 for the console alone, then have to fork out £350 for a replacement because it breaks down with a manufacturing fault, but the company is too pig-headed to replace it even though it wasn’t too long out of warranty
…then fork out for yet another replacement when that one breaks down about another 18months after that, before deciding to just get free one’s with my mobile phone contracts every year.
I’d much rather have a cheap dumb set-top box that plays games, bring it on… but, for fux sake do something about the crappy internetz soon so it can happen
heedbaw
The only real problem I can see with purely digital distribution is what price will games come in at without any retail competition. Look at the PSP Go, only place to get games is PS Store. Yet they are the same price, if not more expensive, than the UMD versions. And the developer is cutting out all manufacturing, packaging and distribution costs.
solidsteven
f**K OFF THQ they seem to forget where their profits come from
Charmed_Fanatic
B*****ds :-P
solidsteven
they got one hell of a wait ungrateful *** ******* *******