Sounds Like The Days of Traditional Consoles Are Numbered!
In a recent interview with Variety, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said that, in the future, there’ll be a “step-by-step” process that’ll lead to less traditional consoles and more consoles that focus on streaming or cloud-based gaming.
“I think we will see another generation, but there is a good chance that step-by-step we will see less and less hardware,” Guillemot said to Variety. “With time, I think streaming will become more accessible to many players and make it not necessary to have big hardware at home.”
“There will be one more console generation and then after that, we will be streaming, all of us,” he added.
When asked how this would affect the AAA gaming industry as a whole, Guillemot had this to say: “It is going to help the triple-A game industry grow much faster. We have to work on the accessibility of games, to make sure they can be played on any device, but the fact that we will be able to stream those games on mobile phones and television screens without a console is going to change a lot of the industry.”
Though Nintendo didn’t seem to agree with Guillemot and PlayStation declined to comment when both were asked by Variety what they thought of this, Xbox head Phil Spencer seemed to be on the same wavelength as Guillemot.
“Our focus right now is asking the question, ‘What can Microsoft do for gaming?’ instead of simply how to stack up against the competition,” Spencer said, before pointing out examples such as Microsoft’s new controller for disabled gamers and the Xbox One’s backward compatibility feature.
“I care less that people play Minecraft on an Xbox One, but that people can play Minecraft no matter what console or device they have in front of them,” Spencer added.
Spencer also said that Microsoft is looking into three areas to invest into in the future: “content, cloud, and community”. He added that he saw future games “evolving beyond generations” and said that he’d like to “keep evolving hardware as multi-generational too.”