Yves Guillemot: One More Console "Generation", then Streaming Takes Over

Variety: Ubisoft Believes Next Gen Is the Last for Consoles as Microsoft Looks Beyond Platforms

I think Yves is pretty much right. I mean realistically the current gen has about 2-3 years left. If a new generation starts in 2020 and stays around for 6-7 years - I could totally see most gaming being done via streaming and/or mobile in a decade or less.

I'm not confident that we'll be there in a decade. I've tried a few streaming services and they kind of work, but barely at a playable level.

Liquidsky, for example, is pretty much fine if you're playing a game that isn't demanding on resource and doesn't require a high reaction time. Pillars of Eternity was playable but not great. DOOM, on the other hand, was an absolute sh*tshow.

I think that this tech will definitely work quite well and be relatively cheap to run within a decade, but I'd be surprised if it becomes a replacement for in-home consoles. I wouldn't want it to because the internet is not 100% reliable.

It's bound to happen, but I'm not confident about it happening in the next decade. A lot of people still have spotty internet, data caps, non-net neutrality, and other things that make streaming unrealistic. Granted, it's getting better all the time, but there are a lot of hurdles to overcome.

You will have to get better, faster, and more dependable and reliable internet that's not capped and can be globally affordable for starters....

not enough bandwidth, the market would shrink if thats the way they wish to go.
technology for outputting graphics is becoming cheaper.. bandwidth technology has not caught up yet and it wont in that time-frame.

I mean, aren't the straight up physical limitations to this ? Unless they plan on expanding an insanely intricate web of servers it's just never gonna be able to deliver the same kinda experience. I'm having a hard time seeing how it's more profitable for them to assemble and maintain this massive amount of server parks rather than just selling the hardware directly to the customer. Sure, they might be able to save some money on shipping, but then there's stuff like power and bandwidth and IT maintenance etc to take care of. I guess people might be willing to spend $20/month even though it adds up to much more than what you'd pay for just buying the console.

Because it worked so well the last time Microsoft wanted an always online gaming solution...

I get it, we're talking a long time from now, and people are already streaming games, if not well. It's possible. But i'd always rather have access to the hardware and not have to rely on having a constant internet connection.

I have a hard time believing so. After collecting a considerable library of PS, Xbox and Steam games, who's paying for bandwith for me to stream my old games. And with Apple recently blocking the steam link app I doubt PS and Xbox would be happy giving Apple any other third party a cut either. And I can't imagine streaming a MP title ever or there being a much bigger crowd willing to spend £40 a pop to stream games yet unwilling to cough up £300 for the box.

Streaming WILL NOT happen. There are way too many issues associated with it that the market will not stand for. Apart from the obvious bandwidth issue, people won't tolerate input lag. Plenty of games out there rely on precision and so if you take that away, the games become way too difficult for no good reason. And then there is the issue of not owning games. We've already heard the news about Pinball Arcade losing 61 tables. We've seen Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 get pulled from the stores for an extended period of time. And there have been other games that fell to similar fates. Yves must be extremely short-sighted, because the idea of streaming only creates more problems than it hopes to solve.

Definitely not happening in North America. Our online infrastructure absolutely cannot support this.

ONLIVE is the future :P. No to be serious it would make sense for Microsoft to use there Azure cloud platform for gaming at this point. Latency is still a thing. But let's hope the internet is a bit faster 15 years from now. I do see Sony sticking to hardware a bit longer and maybe Amazon could become a new major player with AWS and some weird console streaming box. The future for these companies is games as a service and having to pay 15 bucks a month and no hardware cost is probably the future of console gaming. Do i like it? nope but that's where the market is heading to.

Yves is out of his mind. It may work in Paris, but there's no way streaming will fly in rural America, Australia, Canada, South Africa.... basically anyplace other than a built-up metropolis. They'll get a similar backlash to the Xbox One launch always-online DRM the day they try it.

No one is going to accept playing competitive games over a streaming service, and competitive games are most of the highest grossing games in the industry. The idea of a console "iteration" will evolve but thinking it will lead to exclusively streaming is way off the mark.

The infrastructure is nowhere near the level you need to reliably stream games in 20 years. Definitely not in the states. Companies would have to start laying fiber that's significantly faster than current fiber right now for a streaming service to not feel like absolute garbage in 15-20 years and even then there'd still be problems.

I've seen games have completely broken online services on day 1 from companies being blindsided on the server load. What do you think is going to happen on launch day for any new game in a streaming only world?

Not to mention that you will never achieve fluid streaming enough to get rid of latency and input lag. I can't play rhythm games on my steam link or PS link when they only have to go through 20-30 feet of cable, I can't imagine how it would feel waiting for my inputs to ping a host server a mile away and then send me back my results.

It's nice to dream about this, but streaming is a poor dream. A more likely scenario is that more devices will get powerful enough that you won't need a proprietary piece of hardware except for maybe something like a USB stick.

Considering streaming hasn't exactly taken off as is I can'y see anything changing that drastically in a decade. Even under ideal conditions it's still a bit of a compromise, and the internet is far from ideal. Whoever tries to do this would be giving a huge opening to competitors.

Good ol' America dragging its heels again.

Streaming is inevitable, thin clients were huge a while ago, then we moved to dedicated devices, and now we're moving back to thin clients.

That doesn't mean dedicated consoles/PCs will be non existent, competitive games will make sure of that. But why spend $400 every few years on a new PlayStation when a $50 device streams games fine.

It's easy to imagine streaming becoming more prevalent etc, but I dunno about it becoming the main way to play games.

Questions of server infrastructure, hosting costs and all that jazz aside, there is kind of a hard physical limit to how low you can actually get the latency in a situation like that just because of the distances those signals have to physically travel. Depending on the game, it might not really be a problem or even be that detectable, orrr it'll really negatively impact the experience. I play fighting games more than anything else, playing those over a streaming service would be an absolute nightmare. Also, VR absolutely cannot work in that environment.

Maybe when we've all got quantum entangled routers...

At home, I have 400/20 Internet and I have no problem streaming Playstation Now except for the occasional hiccup. I could live with streaming only, but of course, Playstation Now is a service that is struggling to get traction among players which currently has a small user base. What happens to streaming quality when player numbers increase 100 fold? That would be a major concern.

This is highly dependent on factors outside the game industry's control. Its pretty well publicized that US telecom companies are pocketing money that they're supposed to be spending of infrastructure. As long as that keeps happening, latency is going to be an issue for a loooooong time.

I think this makes total sense from a business perspective, but is completely tone deaf about what people actually want. Look at how much that Atari console raised in one day. Microsoft is even gaining a little bit of ground with the One X, since its now the most powerful box on the market. People clearly want dedicated gaming boxes, even while PCs are so much more powerful. And the gpu I was using until it died a month ago is bigger than any phone I've ever seen: I can believe phone gpus are getting competitive, but at a certain point form factor and size are just too limiting. Let alone that I have never had the urge to play something on my 5 1/2" phone screen over my 27" main monitor.

Giving people more options is always a good thing, and people that want to enjoy their games that way, have fun. But I can't imagine a scenario where even if the nightmare of an infrastructure that is the US was completely turned around, I would gladly give up the raw power I'm used to in favor of mobility. But that's even a fantasy scenario, because my internet still goes down when it rains.

It’s inevitable, but I’d never put a date on it, personally.

When the vast majority of people have internet that can support this, sure, but people were saying this stuff a decade ago and it hasn't panned out.

I, for one, do not want to participate in a gaming world where I'm streaming a game from a server Netflix style. I want my games local, right on the machine I'm using to play them.

Oh, yeah. That's probably why OnLive did so well. Oh, wait.

Until someone can actually make a game streaming service that can compete in quality with a locally owned copy of the game, like services like Netflix have done for videos, I don't see any chance of that actually catching on. I wouldn't be surprised within the next decade the major game companies focus more serious attention on creating services that can accomplish something like that (because the ones out now sure as hell don't), but it's not going to completely take over traditional hardware in the foreseeable future.

@ntm: OnLive was 10 years ago, things progress.

Anyways.

Has anyone in this thread actually tried anything current, like GeForce Now? I've had much better results with it than PlayStation Now.

In mediocre conditions (100/10 internet, wifi), it's not bad. Again, I'm not going to play CSGO with it, I'm already bad enough. But I just played Doom 2016 and BioShock Infinite at 2K/ultra on MacBook, so I'm not going to complain.

In another decade, who knows. Maybe.

I remember the GB guys being skeptical about even this console generation working out so I'm not exactly holding my breath when it comes to people's predictions.

As I pointed out during discussion either on live chat or on Infinite.

Sony is pretty much already engrossed in the Smart TV business, in a few years internet connections will be fast enough to allow you to buy for example a Sony TV, that has a box on a side panel that will stream your games to your screen. From that just enable bluetooth from the controller to connect to the TV and done. You won't need to buy a console to play games, cause they are all in the CLOUD

#CloudComputing#VapeNation

I can see this working for singleplayer & slower games, but as AAA games shift more and more to online games, would it make sense? I can't imagine a fighting game ever feeling good as a streamed game.

The more I think about it, online multiplayer games seem more doable. You're adding a second hop, for sure. But it's not necessarily double the ping. You're streaming from a server in us-east-1 with your usual ping to there as always. But that server is talking to another that is likely in the same datacenter. That ping will be drastically lower.

And it's not like the first take on multiplayer over the network was a solved issue, we came up with lag compensation for a reason. Who knows, maybe we can do something similar.

Of course, this is all still years away, and I don't think many games will played at a competitive level using streaming tech.

Yeah. I think people like Yves forget that people who aren't as well off as him have to suffer with slow and unreliable internet. Even country-to-country internet speeds and accessibility change dramatically.

This guy isn't in the console making business so I'm not taking any notice of what he's saying. No one can predict what's going to happen after the next console generation. It's all just guess work.

A lot of the arguments against this happening seem to be based on our wired networks handling the streaming - 5G is rolling out in places now, it wouldn't be surprising if in 10-15 years the wired networks start to become redundant to wireless options. I wouldn't have said a worldwide release of a platform-less streaming service would have been a thing a couple of years ago but seeing what some of the mobile/cell networks are predicting for their services in the future, it might happen, just not in a way we expect it to.

@stantongrouse: The problem is that the traditional improvement of the internet does little to nothing to make this more viable. For video streaming all you need is bandwidth. It doesn't matter if you have bad latency, as long as you have good bandwidth everything is good. And that is exactly what ISPs has focused on providing. For streaming games on the other hand latency is everything. And improving latency is a completely different ballgame. Add in the fact that latency is pretty much a non-issue for everything else on the internet and ISPs have little incentive to invest heavily into it.

That leaves it up to the publishers to develop this alternate network, and to do that globally is a monumental task. Right now Sony and Microsoft only have a very rudimentary network of serverparks to sustain their online stores and matchmaking services. For streaming to be viable globally they would have to set up local servers everywhere. Instead of a network built up by hundreds of local ISPs building and maintaining their part Sony and Microsoft would have to build and maintain the entire thing themselves.

@ares42 True, I guess I tend to read the optimistic 'this will solve everything' articles and presume it's all going to progress past the theory. We're all immersed in the use of online services for gaming, it's easy to lose sight it's a bit of a drop in the ocean in the usage of internet services as a whole.

@mikewhy: Well, I wasn't super serious in my post as a point of contention. That said, OnLive went defunct in 2015 as Sony acquired parts of it. In all seriousness, I'm not totally against it if it works, but I'm not sure I've seen anyone be super optimistic or excited about the idea of streaming being the way of the future. It has always seemed to me this thing that many consumers don't even start to take an interest in. As you say though, things do progress, but his comment felt like it was coming out of the left field to me.

I invite Guillemot to pay for the infrastructure required to get high speed internet to my house.

I think certain genres of game will increasingly require always-online in the future. Perhaps games from a very specific selection of publishers, like Ubi, Rockstar or EA. I think it will be games that integrate single-player and multiplayer, but rely on the latter for growth and longevity. These games are mainly aimed at multiplayer in my book.

I can't see digital downloads disappearing for single-player games. For one thing, GOG on PC has grown quite well against Steam, with more and more new AAA games releasing on GOG. And Sony has been very successful with their PS4 software sales.

Not with data caps, not in North America with our ISPs. They can try it, but the ISPs won't play ball with the customers. They already screw us on video streaming services.

It's not going to happen any time soon. Hardware will always be cheaper than low latency / high bandwith internet.

I live in slightly famous San Diego and pay $50 for internet monthly. I tried psnow and immediately felt the lag, blochiness, and virtual game queue. I will tell you, even if psnow was free I would still rather pay $70 for a AAA game before even considering a streaming service. Further on, didn't congress vote against net neutrality meaning this shit ain't getting cheaper anytime soon... that prediction seems wrong based on my experience.

I love PlayStation Now but cmon, , sometimes it just sucks even on a 600mbps internet. GameFly is breaking into game streaming now too. It’s either gonna launch and fail miserably or be the future as many pc games are sold as “download only” even hen you buy the box.

I'm taking this for a Michael Pachter of salt.