Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot believes that consoles as we know them will go away and new devices focused purely on streaming games will be the standard. That said, Guillemot believes there will be at least one more console generation before that happens.
According to GameSpot Guillemot said during an earnings call said, “We believe in streaming–it demands lots of bandwidth. We think it’s going to grow but today, with the types of games we have, it will still take a bit of time to be more popular.”
“For the new consoles, there’s nothing official on that so my expectation is we will have another cycle of consoles before we go to streaming,” he added. “I don’t have dates or anything but what I see is the manufacturers would prefer to have again a new hardware to take up the potential of new possibilities that they can bring.”
While many video services like Netflix and Amazon Instant Video have already seen huge successes in streaming, games have a bit further to go. It’s possible to stream games from an Xbox One to a Windows PC but that’s about it.
A company called OnLive had attempted to bring streaming into the video game world back in 2009, but wasn’t successful. However, a lot has changed since then and a game streaming service may be more viable in the near future. Many large game publishers feel that streaming is the future as well, and you can’t really blame them. Without dedicated consoles the companies may be able to cut development costs by only making the game once, without the need to make multiple versions for each console.
