Better start saving up for that PlayStation 5, Xbox Two, or Nintendo Swatch (that last follow-up name idea is a freebie, by the way). That generation of consoles might be the last one ever, according to Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. After that, he predicts cheap local boxes could provide easier access to ever-evolving high-end gaming streamed to the masses from cloud-based servers.
I think that’s a little optimistic, but the trend is clear.
Sure publishers want it, because streamed games means:
1. continuous income from players
2. no more piracy
3. no more competition from older releases
Of course players don’t want it, because streamed games means:
1. high prices, as in pay per play
2. can’t play any more when publisher decides it
3. no more trainers, cheats, self-modified games
nicubunu,
The last game I bought was a jackinthebox party game. Although the entire game is played locally, it was stupidly engineered to run off their servers. Alas, around the holidays, which is the time when these kinds of party games are typically played, their servers experience latency and connectivity errors, which is so infuriating for a game that has no reason at all to make outside connections.
On the last point you made about cheats, clever people will always find a way
and/or 
When talking about cheats I’m thinking about single player: when I’m playing I want to have fun, not to be frustrated. If a game is too hard, I may activate ‘god mode’, if a game does not allow to save its state, I may find a way… things like that. If the games does not run on your device, it may be impossible to do them.
Modding may also be impossible or really hard or pay only. Remember when we were downloading and playing Doom wads?
Internet not fast enough, down, or not available? Too bad!
Piracy is a red herring. The actual profit loss from piracy is minuscule because the vast majority of pirates lack either the intent to buy, or the money to buy all the games they pirate, or both. In reality, were piracy not available to them, they would’ve bought only a tiny fraction of the games. It’s worlds apart from the `calculated profit loss` based purely on the assumption that all pirates would’ve otherwise bought all games pirated.
I have zero interest in a streaming-only game console. Pay-per-play, subscriptions to play, or any other BS like that can go jump off a cliff.
Until actual decent broadband is available everywhere. This probably won’t happen for the next decade. Hell, I live in a very populated area, and I still can’t get anything above 100mbps unless I go with Comcast, which will never happen….
Where decent broadband is not available, people probably don’t have either the money to pay for many games.
That depends. I’ve collected hundreds of CD-ROM games, dozens of cartridges, and thousands of digital downloads (the current GOG.com sale brought my library there up to 1448 games), but I live in Canada, in a countryside subdivision.
I’m already lucky to live close enough to a Bell Canada building to have a flat-rate option and Bell only recently upped their “what ISPs can sell” cap for our address from 6Mbit to 25Mbit.
Even given that, our line capacity estimate is 12Mbit downstream (Bell rounds down to a 10Mbit/1Mbit link when provisioning from a set selection of last-mile options, regardless of what ISP you go with), and I’m not going to upgrade to 10Mbit until I resolve what appears to be a “DSL modem crashes and reboots at least twice a day” problem. (Everything else has been ruled out, but my ISP could only send me replacement modems by the same company and the symptoms indicate the modem is resetting.)
Edited 2018-06-09 17:41 UTC
Horrible assumption. Providers pour the majority of their investments into their hottest markets.. Makes sense, right? Unfortunately America is huge and it’s population is vastly spread out. People being able to afford decent internet is far less of a problem than providers willing to invest.
Providers don’t care who has decent internet and who doesn’t. The only thing that matters to them in minimizing costs and maximizing profits, with the emphasis on the former.
Max 4.6mbit where I live here in austria via DSL, and 1.9mbit via LTE.
And I wouldn’t call my country poor.
On PC due to Steam and GOG I was always used to huge discounts, but both on the X360 and the PS4 digital discounts are amazing, most of the games I bought for both systems were under 25$. Just a couple of weeks ago the name of the sale on PS4 was games under 25$.
Otherwise, I am looking forward to the brave new world where my partner can watch 4K TV, and 2 sons and I can all play 4K games on separate devices with minimum lag and without artifacts at the same time.
“Under $25” doesn’t sound that impressive to me.
I own over half GOG’s catalogue and there are only five cases I can think of where I paid more than $5 US per game and only one that I paid more than $7.50 US for.
(I’d own a lot more, but I’ve bought a lot of Humble Bundles, so I’m waiting to see if many of the ones I haven’t bought will show up in GOG Connect.)
Of those, two were $6 not-on-sale Legend Entertainment purchases spurred by fear that, like Death Gate, they too would get pulled before a sale could happen and one was the $15 copy of Stardew Valley I bought as a promised reward for a major personal accomplishment.
The only situation where I find “under $25” noteworthy is when I’m eBaying physical media. (eg. my copies of No One Lives Forever 1 & 2)
https://kotaku.com/the-sad-story-behind-a-dead-pc-game-that-cant-com…
Edited 2018-06-10 23:54 UTC
Excuse me, but your argument is unrelated to what I was stating. My statement was that you can buy under $25, and your response, $5 is also under $25, that is a subset, not a disjunct set.
And it is very cool that the set of games that you are interested in are available for $5, but this does not mean that the rest of us would be interested to play Interplay collection day in day out
.
Jokes aside, I don’t think you have to be a rich guy to be able to afford $25 for a game.
It’s a matter of principle on two fronts:
1. I have so much entertainment available to me (not just games) that I want to spread my funds evenly among developers I want to support. I can’t afford to pay $25 to every developer I want to support and, If I allowed one dev to push me into paying more than usual, it would be unfair to the others.
(I allowed Stardew Valley and alpha-era Minecraft to be exceptions because they were on the “countable on one hand” list of games that hooked me so well that they triggered “obsession at first sight”. I also donated $10 to OpenTTD and plan to find a way to contribute to Endless Sky for the same reason.)
I’ve actually conversed with one of the developers of Shovel Knight on this topic and we share a mutual respect for each other’s positions. In fact, as a result of that, it’s also on the list of games I’m willing to pay an increased price for. (Just not quite as high as what it’s currently going on sale for, given how much else I’ve paid for but not yet beaten.)
2. I have no problem paying $25 or more for physical media, but I’m not going to pay the same price point for something that cuts out the materials, manufacturing, shipping, warehousing, and other supply-chain costs associated with physical media.
Edited 2018-06-11 18:49 UTC
It’s still surprisingly hard to find decent uplink speeds for a reasonable price most places in the US. And if people are going to be streaming games like is being discussed, a good uplink is mandatory, because it becomes a limiting factor for input latency (and TBH, I seriously doubt that people are going to be OK with an extra 50 milliseconds or more of input latency for stuff like FPS games).
Tottally disagree. Some countries, even if people have the money, don’t have good infrastructure to support decent speeds and latency times.
I live in Brazil, and Google is adding submarine cables on our coast because the regular ones are just bad, and they need speed for server communications to USA and brazilian communications monopolist company (Embratel) can’t give them that.
I’m sure games companies will be much happier if it is YOU who pays for the hardware. They can still bugger you silly with subscription fees, random treasure boxes, downloadable content, pay-to-clear timers and much worse things they are surely devising.
Piracy is a non-argument: I don’t think there is meaningful piracy in the console world. POS software at POS prices and mugware is the problem in mobile, not piracy. And I don’t do PC gaming, but I would say it is also going fine.
Piracy is mostly a PC thing, but even there it’s not a problem like the devs make it out to be. Most cases of piracy are situations where there was either no intent or no ability to purchase in the first place, so it’s generally not a lost sale, it’s just another person playing the game. The issue of piracy could be pretty easily solved by not charging 70-80 USD for a game (though, somewhat ironically, most of the best games I’ve played in the past year that weren’t F2P were under 30 USD in price, I’ve bought a couple significantly more expensive ones, but usually regretted it).
All in all though, yes, the PC gaming scene is doing fine. Arguably better even than the console scene, because there’s less barrier to entry for most people, and if you’re smart you don’t have to shell out money every other year for new hardware that doesn’t play your old games.
I have to strongly disagree with your last part.
Console generations endure around 5 to 6 years, not “other every year”. PC gamers change hardware much more often, and pay more for it, than console gamers.
About retro-compatibility, Microsoft still fights to give their consoles this option; so if this is a must for you, just get an XBox One.
Though I suppose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_Battalion controller won’t work on Xbox One, first Xbox had custom controller ports …oh well, probably worth getting the first Xbox just to play this game.
They’ve been predicting this for years, but it’s little more than wishful thinking at this point.
Gamers don’t want it, so the technology will need to be beyond perfect in order to entice people to adopt it, and even then it will only be practical for people who have a great broadband connection.
It’s not going to be happening anytime soon.