Ubisoft Believes Next Gen Is the Last for Consoles

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Ubisoft’s Yves Guillemot thinks that the next console generation will be the last, as game streaming will replace all platforms. The co-founder and CEO called the ability to stream AAA games to more screens as “one of the biggest innovations coming in the game industry,” something that would “help the AAA game industry grow much faster.”

“I think we will see another generation, but there is a good chance that step-by-step we will see less and less hardware,” Guillemot said. “With time, I think streaming will become more accessible to many players and make it not necessary to have big hardware at home. There will be one more console generation and then after that, we will be streaming, all of us.”
 
I'm seeing a growing murmur along these lines and overall I tend to agree as well.
 
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I like GeforceNow, mainly because its free (for now). The games I've played look at least as good as current gen consoles, but I wouldn't say they reach high end pc quality.

That said I dont think this will hit mainstream. One of the reasons geforcenow works in simply because there are very little users. Once you scale to hundreds of thousands not to say millions, network will quickly become congested, it really won't matter if you have a 100mb or better connection, latency will probably suck and it would only get worse with multiplayer games.
 
Nope I'd rather give up gaming than use game streaming. I wouldn't pay a single $0.01 for a streaming game or the inevitable monthly to just to have the ability to play what I supposedly paid for.

As far as infrastructure goes, it's not here and won't be here till 1 Gbps with no data caps is available everywhere where the ISP doesn't over saturate nodes in the neighborhood. IMHO that isn't going to happen in the next 10 years and the evidence clearly points to this given how ISPs like Verizon have stopped expanding their FiOS installation areas. So will it happen maybe but I doubt for the next 20 or more years at least before I would see it as something a game company could profit from. Remember consoles can be used by everyone, a streaming service can only be used by people with money enough to afford not only a reliable high speed connection but a monthly game streaming service fee plus the games they will "subscribe" to.
 
I think the problem with too many predictions is that that they are all or nothing. Streaming content of all kinds is obviously a growing trend, even gaming. But gaming is always finding new ways to suck up performance especially at the high end. And the infrastructure for always connected everything is not where near that for many places in the world. So as with most things there'll be a mix of platforms even in the long term. Streaming where it works and local hardware where streaming simply doesn't deliver. In many cases I see users utilizing both.
 
I think this attitude (that streaming will replace local processing) is typical of people who just don't understand that there are still loads of places where the infrastructure just doesn't exist to support streaming (and won't exist in the forseeable future either). It's great if you live in an urban area with excellent broadband but if you don't...
 
Bahahaha, he doesn't realize 70% of America only has access to shit internet, and another 15% only have access to good internet at ludicrous prices. Not to mention the fucking lag you're going to get. Guess what guys!!! We'll have FLYING CARS next year, 2019, it will be the best year, with the best flying cars. Believe me.
 
I see, so somewhere around 80% of the world's population will no longer even have potential to become customers for game developers?

That's a growth business model right there.
 
I think people don't realize that the US has poorer infrastructure than say, the EU - one of the rare benefits of socialized everything in the EU, is that when some politician's brother's cousin works for an ISP, they then can force everyone to migrate to high end broadband despite the exorbitant costs. Not much I envy Europe for, but I want to say their Networking backbone is currently 3x the speed of the US.
 
I think people don't realize that the US has poorer infrastructure than say, the EU - one of the rare benefits of socialized everything in the EU, is that when some politician's brother's cousin works for an ISP, they then can force everyone to migrate to high end broadband despite the exorbitant costs. Not much I envy Europe for, but I want to say their Networking backbone is currently 3x the speed of the US.
The infrastructural differences between the US and EU do exist, but not for the reason you've cited. The bolded section in particular is just bollocks.
 
this was obvious since they started talking about 5G.
games won't be limited by hardware, devs will create the game they want and adapt the hardware to it, that will be neat.
 
Ubisoft needs to quick drinking and then fix his DRM issues first before dealing with massive lag and image quality issues associated with streaming games.


Streaming games basically work by pre-rendering frames for multiple input scenarios. Left, Right, Forward, Back and if they have bandwidth up/down with compression. That takes a lot of bandwidth even with advanced compression techniques comparing differences between same frame
 
Of course streaming will take over for triple a titles, easier to gouge people that way.

I am not a fan of the direction of this industry, streaming games only might just be the end of gaming for me.
 
hurray more lag. more options and qualtiy removedfomr the customer in the name of squessing evreyone for more money
 
This Ubisoft genius needs to spend some time touring rural America and experiencing first hand the blazing dial up speeds millions of Americans still contend with. 5G won't help in the many areas where you are lucky to get 1 dot of cell strength. Not to mention data caps in most areas with decent speeds.
 
The infrastructural differences between the US and EU do exist, but not for the reason you've cited. The bolded section in particular is just bollocks.
I was being facetious dumbass. Although you are ignorant if you don't think that's how politics aren't really done especially in the EU and socialist countries where politicians hold all the power.
 
Nope I'd rather give up gaming than use game streaming. I wouldn't pay a single $0.01 for a streaming game or the inevitable monthly to just to have the ability to play what I supposedly paid for.

As far as infrastructure goes, it's not here and won't be here till 1 Gbps with no data caps is available everywhere where the ISP doesn't over saturate nodes in the neighborhood. IMHO that isn't going to happen in the next 10 years and the evidence clearly points to this given how ISPs like Verizon have stopped expanding their FiOS installation areas. So will it happen maybe but I doubt for the next 20 or more years at least before I would see it as something a game company could profit from. Remember consoles can be used by everyone, a streaming service can only be used by people with money enough to afford not only a reliable high speed connection but a monthly game streaming service fee plus the games they will "subscribe" to.

This. Until they compare the bandwidth requirements to show me that streaming games is minimal I'd rather take what we have now. As I understand it once you download say an MMO then the resulting back and forth data is minimal as all the requests are processed by the client. to crunch numbers and graphics. I would see streaming games take much more bandwidth as the full graphics are being transmitted not just requests to the client to produce said graphics.
 
Yeah, this would be my nightmare. We have enough game shutdowns each year as it is without making ALL games have a lifespan of a few years before the developer shuts down the server.
 
I was being facetious dumbass. Although you are ignorant if you don't think that's how politics aren't really done especially in the EU and socialist countries where politicians hold all the power.
Oh please, let's not talk shite about "socialist" countries, yeah?
 
They need to hype streaming so they can get many VCs to throw their money at it. Hell wish I could get in on the pre IPOs. Throw 100 bucks at it. Turn that into 100k in a year or something :)
 
You know, if we voted with our wallets on the whole DLC thing and made it not even worthwhile, forcing game companies to make actual game expansions instead, we might not be facing this turn of events.
 
Ubisoft’s Yves Guillemot thinks that the next console generation will be the last, as game streaming will replace all platforms. The co-founder and CEO called the ability to stream AAA games to more screens as “one of the biggest innovations coming in the game industry,” something that would “help the AAA game industry grow much faster.”

“I think we will see another generation, but there is a good chance that step-by-step we will see less and less hardware,” Guillemot said. “With time, I think streaming will become more accessible to many players and make it not necessary to have big hardware at home. There will be one more console generation and then after that, we will be streaming, all of us.”
Ubisoft’s Yves Guillemot thinks that the next console generation will be the last, as game streaming will replace all platforms. The co-founder and CEO called the ability to stream AAA games to more screens as “one of the biggest innovations coming in the game industry,” something that would “help the AAA game industry grow much faster.”

“I think we will see another generation, but there is a good chance that step-by-step we will see less and less hardware,” Guillemot said. “With time, I think streaming will become more accessible to many players and make it not necessary to have big hardware at home. There will be one more console generation and then after that, we will be streaming, all of us.”
Ubisoft’s Yves Guillemot thinks that the next console generation will be the last, as game streaming will replace all platforms. The co-founder and CEO called the ability to stream AAA games to more screens as “one of the biggest innovations coming in the game industry,” something that would “help the AAA game industry grow much faster.”

“I think we will see another generation, but there is a good chance that step-by-step we will see less and less hardware,” Guillemot said. “With time, I think streaming will become more accessible to many players and make it not necessary to have big hardware at home. There will be one more console generation and then after that, we will be streaming, all of us.”
heard this all before wrong then likely wrong still
 
This is the only way we get more advanced games >.<

Keep waiting on your 1180 TIs folks... Nvidia is in no rush, you may get one next year.... perhaps.

Game developers are not targeting high end hardware and they aren't ever going to target high end hardware.

No one is making another crysis that chokes 95% of the install bases computers and sells like shit.

However if you tell them they can target (insert streaming companies) server setup... with banks of Next Gen GPUs and banks of server cores with almost unlimited RAM. (Expect comapnies like Nvidia to add server software support that caches textures in memory for multiple game instances ect... gamins software future is server optimization)

Well at that point we may actually get some insane looking streamed games.

Its easy to scoff now cause they are streaming games aimed at PS4 hardware. Just wait till you see a service launch in a few years with graphics aimed at server hardware that simply couldn't run on any personal machine. There will be Streaming exclusives make no doubt... and what will be offered will be a dramatic step up in quality. People look at Nvidias latest ray traced star wars demo and say ya but that will be YEARS before that runs on someones PS or PC.... well with streaming powering that level of Graphics would be no issue. The next step for the gaming industry is optimizing that type of thing to power multiple instances (players) running on the same memory space... perhaps even sharing calculated data to reduce the number of cores needed per player.

Infrastructure will sort itself... and if the US is really as backwards as some of you claim. Do you really think the rest of the world is going to wait for the US to de assify their heads on the matter... Japan the EU, even Canada where damn near everyone in a city has access to fiber at this point are all going to be more then ready in 5-10 years.

5-10 years that is what Ubisoft is saying here... one more generation. PS5 will happen and it will be mostly what people expect I'm sure... likely Zen/Vega. After that though PS6 is I have no doubt going to be ARM based... and if Sony doesn't lay the ground work on it and get their developers building exclusives that could only run on a server system, a company like Valve might just come along and drop a 100 dollar box that decimates them. Someone is going to do it and 5-10 years (the time frame of PS6 class hardware) is no doubt when someone is going to make a big play.
 
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I like GeforceNow, mainly because its free (for now). The games I've played look at least as good as current gen consoles, but I wouldn't say they reach high end pc quality.

That said I dont think this will hit mainstream. One of the reasons geforcenow works in simply because there are very little users. Once you scale to hundreds of thousands not to say millions, network will quickly become congested, it really won't matter if you have a 100mb or better connection, latency will probably suck and it would only get worse with multiplayer games.


And this is exactly why IMO I think this steaming gaming idea is fucking stupid. You will never be able to have a consistently super low latency (which is what it would take to really make this work) connection. Just another way they are trying to dream up to FUCK us ALL in the drive-thru. Think of the pure fuckery these clownshoes will be able to pull then. No.
 
And this is exactly why IMO I think this steaming gaming idea is fucking stupid. You will never be able to have a consistently super low latency (which is what it would take to really make this work) connection. Just another way they are trying to dream up to FUCK us ALL in the drive-thru. Think of the pure fuckery these clownshoes will be able to pull then. No.

That was the same argument Blockbuster made, the pipe will never be good enough. That went well for them.

With the money involved the pipe will take care of itself... as it did for video streaming. With the American ISPs sure I have no doubt the Sonys, MS, Valves of the world are going to have to pay them off. Regardless there is a market and as long as the right palms are greased things can change real fast as far as how much pipe is on offer for what.

Latency won't be seen as an issue when people are offered heavily ray traced games that it would take 4 GPUs and a thread ripper to power at home. If Ubisoft is saying it already I have no doubt they have already heard more then we have... I am sure Sony Valve ect have R&D at work, and getting game developer in early targeting insane server class GPU clusters is how they are going to sell the masses on Streaming. Every new class of hardware needs exclusives that feel actually exclusive.... I have a feeling the games we get with the first major big push streaming services will be the type of leap we haven't seen in 20 years.
 
Yeah, I see it happening as well. Removes the customer from the equation and gives 100% control to the publisher. Allows for the Publisher to control what games users can play and when, all with a nice subscription pay model.
 
Game streaming will be competing with 4K HDR/8K HDR streaming as well. 1080p streams when next gen will due well with 4K HDR gaming is another aspect. Seems like the timeline is not right - two generations maybe 10-15 years. That is if the World does not dissolve into another World War.
 
I have a feeling the games we get with the first major big push streaming services will be the type of leap we haven't seen in 20 years.
And those games will last 4 - 10 years before you can never play them again because they shut them down to make room for the new batch. Can't fucking wait.
 
Not that I give much of a shit about consoles myself, but why would streaming mean no more consoles? Do consoles not have networking? What would prevent a console from streaming a game just like anything else?

Streaming may very well be realistic in the future, but that kind of back end rendering will be a huge huge cost. Right now the compute and rendering power is distributed, everyone's' pc does the work. And that cost is distributed.

How much juice will it take for say a game like Fortnite to be a streamed title, with what 1 million simultaneous players playing at a given moment? A million 1080Ti's worth of GPU power, plus gargantuan network infrastructure... could probably be multiple datacenters, which might lower lag/input latency if they are scattered about the country, but what about my east coast and west coast buddies who are on a different datacenter than someone in Texas? Could we still play together? What about lan parties? We still have those a few times a year.

And whenever this shift does happen, which is basically the same thing as virtual desktops in say a big company, (powerful backend server that houses all the compute, ram, storage. Your pc is just be a dumb terminal/display, sending keypresses and mouseclicks and receiving streamed video), what would a small developer like pubg do? (Pubg was great when it was new). I suppose have to make some deal with a platform that does the streaming.. likely at much less profit.

Feels like to me it will squeeze out the little guy game dev, only the big and few would be able to build the backend needed.. but hell, I'm not really sure they want to pony up all that money.. But it will probably turn into a pay to play system. I have to pay some fee for every single game I play. Turn gaming back into a slot machine cash cow.. Or maybe it would be a subscription. I pay $9.99 a month and play whatever I want, as much as I want (like now netflix works). Of course they will want something nuts like $39.99 a month... fuck that.

The ONLY possibly good thing I could see this producing is a platform that cannot be cheated on.. Nothing in memory to hack, it's all remote. Oh wait, the fuckers will probably find a way.. So much for that.

I am nowhere near ready to give up my pc.

Game streaming would have to coexist with pc's and powered consoles to even have a thought of getting off the ground.. In the scenario about with 1 million simultaneous players, that point really was about how this feels like a way to shut out the little guy game devs.. but let's say there's 1 million simultaneous gamers playing whatever myriad of games. It's still 1 million gpu's worth of rending. I'm sure someone knows what the peak number of online gamers playing all games is ... probably in the ten's of millions.. So for 10 million games, 10 million 1080ti's, at a half price bulk discount of $400 per, that's 4 billion dollars... and that's just 1 piece of the backend to make something like this work. Like EA or anyone else wants to fork over such a huge investment on something that might not take off. But wait! Netflix has some awesome exclusives (originals), so they could do the same thing.

But it'll flop if the experience is shit. And as many have noted above, there are massive areas with shitty broadband that simply couldn't bear the load for those gamers. Online gaming doesn't need tons of bandwidth, just great ping and latency. I know the old doom could be played on 28k modem, which is like 3Kb/sec. the way games play currently is movement and clicks are sent to the server, and you receive movement of all the objects onscreen. It doesn't need nearly as much bandwidth as streaming video in 4k does (which by the time something like this could be a reality, is what we will all be used to). I'm sure someday all the backend will be upgraded to a degree that it could handle 100 million people streaming games/netflix/music simultaneously (granted the networking portion of the work is distributed) but I don't think it will be anytime soon. Well, not unless google fiber decides to go ahead and start up again...

Another idiot CEO, who reads something in a trade magazine and thinks they know everything... having seen the CEO of the company I used to work for do the same dipshittery, run the company into the ground, I will not be holding my breath for this to happen anytime soon. Video game studios are like superbright stars. They burn bright for a few years then explode in a supernova and lay everyone off. Not an environment conducive to spending the many billions building the infrastructure that game streaming would require. The whole ecosystem and business model will shift if this eventually happens.

But you know what, It just sounds like all the "PC's are gonna be dead in 2 years!" type bullshit that we've heard over and over for years and years.

Take your crystal ball and shove it up your ass...
 
One positive about steaming multiplayer games, maybe it'll curtail the cheating plague. But single player? Gimme my download.
 
I think people don't realize that the US has poorer infrastructure than say, the EU - one of the rare benefits of socialized everything in the EU, is that when some politician's brother's cousin works for an ISP, they then can force everyone to migrate to high end broadband despite the exorbitant costs. Not much I envy Europe for, but I want to say their Networking backbone is currently 3x the speed of the US.

The countries are also smaller and more densely populates.
Much easier to wire a large city than a rural countryside.
 
Yeah, this would be my nightmare. We have enough game shutdowns each year as it is without making ALL games have a lifespan of a few years before the developer shuts down the server.

So much for going back and playing that game you really liked several years ago....

My kid just finished replaying the 3 original Spyro games on the Playstation 1 I still have.
Wife's been playing a couple of the old Wii games she liked from years ago.

All this goes away when they switch to streaming. Just like with Netflix.
One of the reasons I dropped Netflix years ago, is that every time I made a list on movies I wanted to watch, several of them would be removed from the service before I could watch them.
Got tired of looking forward to a Family movie night, only to have to try and find something else to watch because half my list went away.

I won't even go into Nintendo.
They still advertise the 3DSXL and the newer 2DSXL, yet there are almost no new games coming out, since all development is now going to the Switch.
Next Pokemon games are only going to be on the Switch, something that is not as portable, and costs twice as much.
 
This is another way to grab more cash from people. Streaming would theoretically reach many more than purchases ever will, but, I don't see this becoming the standard. The current broadband speeds make this impractical, and will be this way for some time. Most major internet cable providers still have problems keeping these current networks at advertised speeds and relatively acceptable lag. Millions of new users jumping on won't make things better, not by a long shot.
 
Can't wait to start streaming my 4k by 4k VR with my CAPd interet with overages. Could play 15 minutes of Skyrim VR enhanced edition for the low price of 800 dollars.
 
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