No future for game consoles

By Mike Bantick
Tuesday, 01 December 2009 05:38

Opinion and Analysis

The head of one of the world’s most successful game developers has stated that his company is ready for the demise of the home entertainment game console as we know it today.  Could it be another entry in an expanding conspiracy that will become clearer as time goes by?

The UK based video game web site MCV is  running an interview with Yoichi Wada, CEO of Square Enix, the company that has given the world the Final Fantasy series of Role Playing Games.

Part of the interview touches on the future of home entertainment hardware, including the vanishing of game consoles as we know them today.  According to Yoichi San; “In ten years’ time a lot of what we call ‘gaming consoles’ won’t exist,”

Supposedly Microsoft and Sony have been aware of this fact for some time:“Somewhere around 2005 the console manufacturers’ strategy shifted,” he said.

“In the past the platform was hardware, but it has switched to the network. A time will come when the hardware isn’t even needed anymore.

“With that, any kind of terminal becomes a potential platform on which games can be played – that’s exponential growth in the potential of gaming. The potential size of the market is enormous.”

Accordingly Square Enix is looking towards social networking and browser based platforms as the next ‘big thing’ in gaming, shifting resources into products that cater for those markets and presumably away from traditional disc-based formats.

Of course this is great in a connected world, but despite what those on the cutting edge of what the technological world can deliver think, there is a significant proportion of the population - or as Sony and Microsoft should see them - market place, that are far from ready to make a jump into digital distribution as a sole source of entertainment.

Indeed there is nothing stopping these companies subtly nudging the marketplace in the desired direction.  Sony has been most overt in this recently with the release of the digital distribution only PSP Go.  So far the market reception to this has been luke-warm.  It is difficult to gauge this failure simply on the structure of content delivery mechanism in isolation.  The PSP Go has, after all, got a number of acceptance hurdles to overcome apart from its online only approach.  Being sold with its UMD (The Sony only disc format of the original PSP) equipped and much cheaper brethren, the PSP-3000 being the most significant.

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