This is probably the future. Sadly, it’s not one that really moves me. I don’t game in the living room. I don’t have a game console. My living space and habits are not in line with that vision of gaming. The types of games I play often do not align well with that model either. What I want though is immaterial, as I represent a portion of the gaming world that is infinitesimal compared to the majority, where companies have to focus their efforts if they expect to be profitable.
Luckily I’m old and will probably be dead before PC gaming as I know it dies out completely!
Console gaming has been doomed since 1985. PC gaming was doomed back when I worked at CGW in the mid-90’s.
@TheWombat, PC gaming as you like it will continue, it will just not be mainstream ever again. And as a combat flight sim fan, I feel your pain. At least wargames can still get by with cheap art assets.
To be clear, I am not bemoaning anything. I am an outlier and happy to be one. And I always look forward to cool new things, even if I might not totally embrace them. Who knows, it’s not impossible that I will do some living room gaming on the big screen in the future, even, if the stars align.
Sadly, this is more of a problem than a boon. Too many wargames are fugly as home made sin and seem to have UI/UX designs from hell.
Yeah. I can’t see MS putting this much effort and money into releasing almost all their stuff on pc, or Sony putting their exclusives on Steam and Epic store if this was not the case.
I will say, though, I’ve done a 180 on the future of cloud gaming. My initial experiences with OnLive (ugh), XCloud betas, and early Stadia releases convinced me that speed of light was always going to limit cloud gaming’s potential for action and twitch games.
However, in my never-ending quest to poorly use my time for 10 cents of MS Rewards credit in order to get free MSFS airplanes, I’ve played a number of action-oriented Game Pass titles via XCloud, and darn if they weren’t good experiences. (Albeit on gigabit cable.) So that does make me think that cloud gaming will someday satisfy the more casual crowd.
I think we will still see consoles for a few more generations, though, for core gamers. And PC gaming will never die**, because it’s an open, uncurated platform and that will always appeal to some.
** Though by the time I die in 2065 it might be all wargames, crappy 8-bit “retro” games, and hentai games. So many hentai games.
Yes, I think this is an accurate prediction. Console hardware won’t go away completely, and owning specific hardware will give the best-possible experience, but most people will play on devices they already own.
River Raid wasn’t as good as everyone said. Kaboom was good. Stampede and Dragster were a lot better than they should have been. But really Activision never was M Network or Imagic, never finding its Dark Cavern or Cosmic Ark. That guy with the big nose was actually good in Moneyball, though.
Absolutely correct. At some point in the future, most people will play their games either via streaming or on their displays, because the hardware required to game will be cheap commodity stuff.
Enthusiasts will still buy gaming consoles and build tricked-out PCs, because we care about that stuff, but this will be an increasingly niche market as time passes.
One example I always give is hi-fi sets. When my dad was a kid he built his own hi-fi sets from kits. This was an enthusiast thing, like building PCs today, and similarly it offered a comparable experience to commercial hi-fis at a much lower price. Then transistor radios came in and suddenly home audio got really cheap. You could still build your own hi-fi, and plenty of people did it, but over time that dwindled away until today it’s super rare.
Gaming PCs and consoles are like that. They aren’t complete commodities yet, but you can squint and look to the future and realize there will come a time when streaming games will be completely mainstream, or perhaps the processor built-in to your cheap TV will be “good enough” to play the latest highest fidelity games.
