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Previously, I had written about how the defining feature of gaming's next generation will be a greater focus on accessibility. Today I would like to focus on one specific aspect of this: Bringing games to where the people are.
In the short history of gaming it has been an almost universal truth that people had to go to where the games were to play them. We had arcades which we had to drive to in order to play games. We had dedicated games consoles that people had to buy, set up and switch out games. We had PCs but were still limited in that people had to actively go to the game/computer store to buy games to play. In all these instances, the games did not come to the people. The people had to go to them.
In the future, games will be everywhere there are people a screen and an input device. You can already see this in mobile phones. Since the rise of the mobile phone with a screen, we have had gaming. It was limited in its scope to tetris clones, snake, card games and other limited graphic games. Now we have two prominent smart phone developers that have brought high resolution gaming to the public. People are used to carrying phones and now have the ability to use them as micro PCs including playing games on them.
Look at Facebook as well. Here we have a social network with over 500 million users. People join this service to get back in touch with old friends, keep up to date with current friends and family and just talk about themselves. It comes as no surprise that gaming followed. The majority of Facebook users play at least one game on the service. A smaller but still significant number use Facebook primarily for gaming.
So what does this mean for the future of gaming? This means we will see a greater emphasis on bringing gaming to the people raher than asking them to come to us.
How will this be done? I think it will come via a partnership with cable and satellite providers. They have millions of subscribers throughout the world. These people are ripe for an introduction to gaming. The majority of these people do not own a gaming console or at the least have one on a secondary tv such as in a kids room. But almost all of these people have a set top box or DVR. This is where these people will find gaming in the future.
I am aware that several pay tv providers have attempted what I am suggesting in the past. Unfortunately, the games they offered were limited in their appeal and presentation. They were no better than many early phone or Flash games. They were not able to offer any real compelling content to the user. This, however, is changing.
Let's look at one example that doesn't quite meet the prediction I am making but is pretty close. This is OnLive. This service allows the player to own a simple box with almost no real horsepower to play any number of current release PC games on their TV or computer monitor. They don't have to worry that their PC's specs match the requirements of the game because all their OnLive box is doing is sending input and receiving and displaying the output. It just transmits data. This is all that is needed to bring gaming to the people. Unfortunately, this still requires the potential players to seek out gaming.
What can happen is for a major game provider such as OnLive, or maybe a gaming portal like Kongregate to partner with the cable and satellite providers to offer gaming through the DVRs that people get with their service. This gaming "channel" can be offered as an extra tier in much the same way people purchase HBO and certain sports networks. The key however is to offer the user some games by default in much the same way they offer basic tv channels.
What I am describing is still not perfect, but if you could offer people a subscription based service for games through hardware they currently own they will follow. They will find it much easier to switch from the tv channels to the gaming channel on the DVR than it currently is to switch from the DVR to a gaming console.
Now the question remains, who will make the first move?
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Doesn't really matter much who gets there first I guess ... your basic argument is sound. Non-traditional console gaming competition is coming to the living room sooner than later.
The goal your describing is very far off in my opinion. People have talked about similar ideas since the early 2000's, and the technology simply isn't there, yet.
I do believe that the technology is there, it just has not been implemented properly yet.
But I don't see people going out and buying a game console simply to bypass the cable provider. I don't subscribe to cable, not because I own a Netflix capable console, but because I never saw the value in it. There are millions of people in this country who do subscribe to cable or satellite because they value it. These are the people that such a service would be targeted to.
Assuming that we're talking about "hardcore" games, rather than the basic Flash stuff we've seen to date, there's little chance that a high-spec settop box will ever be released, and even if it was, there would still be latency issues with pushing game data to the machine fast enough to keep players from getting frustrated.
This leaves game-streaming as the only real alternative, and systems such as OnLive have shown that this can work. However, the need to minimise latency means that the rendering systems have to be relatively close to the end-user, and the unique nature of the streaming means that there's no opportunity to cache the data. Worse, the fact that everyone's liable to be playing during peak time means that there's limited opportunity to utilise licences on a time-share basis - and the latency and picture quality are liable to suffer from the fact that it'll be peak time and other people will also be wanting to play games/stream video/etc.
However, as William has noted, there is a significant chance that things could go the other way. With increasing levels of bandwidth available, console-based services like Netflix and BBC iPlayer are reducing the need for cable TV, as they offer the capability of watching what you want, when you want.
Like I said above, the technology is already here, it just hasn't been implemented yet.
For instance, you could fill a truck full of DLT tapes and far outpace the bandwidth of a standard ADSL connection. But the latency'd suck ;)
Latency is generally tied into the distance that the data has to travel. Fundamentally, the speed of light (and/or electricity through copper) is the ultimate barrier, but the biggest factor is the number of "hops" which the data has to jump through (i.e. intermediary devices such as routers and firewalls: each read/check/forward step incurs a delay; there's also an increased risk of packet loss and possible issues with packets being delayed due to caching). And there's also the fact that the journey is a round trip: the server generally has to receive data from the client before updating the gamestate and rendering the next frame.
Fundamentally, game-rendering systems will need to stay relatively close to the end-player for the response times to remain competitive with local machines. And the systems will need to be specc'd up to handle huge peaks, both for game launches (e.g. 1 million people logged on to play Halo 3 in the first twenty hours after launch) and ongoing: I'd expect most day-to-day use to take place in the "5pm - 9pm" peak-time slot - and given the need to "localise" the data-centers, there's limited opportunity to bring in processing power from other timezones to take up the load.
So: between latency and scaling, streaming game systems have a long, long way to go. And by the time they get there, we may well have a new generation of home consoles, which could well be a factor of ten more powerful if prior trends are maintained (e.g. PSX@40mhz, PS2@400mhz; PS3@3.2ghz + SPEs)...
But you underestimate current technology. Most cable/satellite providers already provide a direct or as near direct as possible connection to the source of the programming. The connection distance and hopping in minimal compared to playing on a service like OnLive. So you could theoretically see less latency using a direct connection through cable than you will through the internet.
Of course we are talking milliseconds and seconds here. The average user will not be as concerned about such issues as the more traditional "hardcore" gamer. The people this technology will reach will be at first the same type of people who are buying Wiis, playing Facebook games or gaming on their smartphone.
However, as the technology is adopted by more people, their needs will change and they will demand better services that provide less latency and more power and then technology will come to meet those needs.
I think at this time, the technology is readily available to meet the "non-hardcore" needs of the average tv subscriber.
The technology will not be perfect at first. It rarely if never is. But it will get better.
Most providers use caching systems (e.g. Akami) to bring content as close to the end-user as possible: that's how they minimise latency and network overheads. However, you can't cache content which is generated on demand, and that's exactly what game streaming is.
Beyond that, let's do some quick and dirty number crunching :)
The Xbox 360 runs at approx. 1050 Gflops. There's an estimated 30 million Xbox 360 consoles in the USA.
Let's say that at peak, a fifth of these are in use. That's 6 million consoles, or a total processing power of 6 Tflops. Throw in the PS3, Wii and PC gamers, and you can probably take that total to around 20 million active gaming sessions, or around 20 Tflops. And if you assume an average of 512mb per user, that's a total of 10,000 terabytes of *ram*!
Now, this would be split across multiple data centers and cable companies, and there is some "economies of scale" and data-sharing which can be done, so you can run multiple sessions on the same node. But the infrastructure needed to support all of this is still several orders of magnitude greater than at present: most internet-based services are heavy on bandwidth and data throughput (e.g. database activity); they're not as reliant on processing power. Even the gaming giant which is WoW doesn't need as much per-user processing power/ram as this sort of system would require.
And that's before we get the leap to the next generation of consoles, which are likely to be anywhere between 5-10 times as powerful as the current systems. And it's before you take into account things like 3D graphics, which require extra processing power. And it's before you consider the cost of software licencing - aside from the games, what OS will these VMs be running? And all of this will have to be paid for by the cable companies and the money clawed back through subscription fees, which is a relatively slow process.
It's all certainly feasible, but there's going to be a lot of costs involved - I work on a data warehouse system which processes tens of millions of records a day, so I have some idea as to the scale, cost and difficulty of running and maintaining this sort of system. And it's a lot :)
Overall, I'm sticking to my prediction that we're be moving away from "static media" providers such as cable companies, and towards a future where you have a reasonably powerful box under your TV (or built into it), which will stream stuff on demand. In other words, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo could well end up replacing the cable companies...
Current trends seem to dictate that people will be able to access much of their cable tv content through their game console of choice in the near future. If this comes to be, then the next generation "game consoles" will nullify the set top box in a number of homes.
Few people seem to know about Mediaroom on Xbox 360s. AT&T has utilized this service to bring TV, in a limited scope, to the Xbox. The capabilities of the service include DVR functionality, channel listings, and content sharing.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/14/freebox-v6-revolution-set-top-box-brings-call
ing-tv-and-gaming/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkIsRztIDaY
Hardly an insurmountable problem, but these things are important.
However, if Apple does go ahead with this, I'd suspect it's more likely that Apple will base the controller on the iPod Touch (while also releasing a "controller" app for their other devices): as a controller, the iPad is prohibitively expensive. Especially when it comes to multiplayer - how many people can afford to fork out $1600 for four controllers?