RIP consoles

AltTabbins

AltTabbins

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:rolleyes:

gizmodo.com said:
Former Xbox Europe exec Sandy Duncan recently declared that consoles were a dying breed, due to disappear in a mere 5 to 10 years. At first, it's a laughable remark. I mean, consoles are insanely popular moneymakers, why would they disappear? Sure, physical media will be gone by the next generation, but don't you need a standardized set of hardware and controllers for developers to create games for?

Well, today that's true, but what Sandy was talking about was cluster computing, the idea that down the line, all the brainpower for game consoles will be located remotely. Consumers will have low-power local units that'll just hook up to a display, which a huge, beefy server farm will run the games themselves and pipe them to you over a high-speed internet connection.

It's certainly an interesting idea, as it would stop requiring people to upgrade their PCs with the hottest graphics card and would allow developers to create games as demanding as they're able to power. However, it seems to me that we might still be a bit far away from the bandwidth that would be required for such a setup.

Is super-high speed internet really going to be widespread enough in 5 years for us to ditch local consoles altogether? While I think this idea will take hold and become the norm eventually, I'd be shocked if we didn't have one more generation of high-powered consoles that eschewed physical media. It'll be a stepping stone generation, but with current console lifespans looking to be pretty long and the bandwidth requirements for cluster computing gaming still pretty steep, that whole idea seems to be 10 years away at the very least.

What do you guys think? Are consoles doomed, or do we have a good long time to wait before they become obsolete?
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Reminds me of the 30's version of what the year 2000 would be like with space-homes, rocket cars and everybody wearing levi's made of tinfoil. I believe that physical media will slowly go away, but I think that crap about playing games over a server farm is a bunch of crap.
 
ummm... people like to own things, be it a real console, a computer and media. i doubt this will take off anytime soon, seriously take books for example, how come books are still being released and read in the physical medium of paper? because people still want and like owning things.
 
I remember about 10 years ago music as we know it was doomed and was going to be replaced by all elektronica. ie: Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, etc. AP and Rolling Stone were pushing that story hard.

uhhhh that never happened either......
 
Tetrahedron said:
ummm... people like to own things, be it a real console, a computer and media. i doubt this will take off anytime soon, seriously take books for example, how come books are still being released and read in the physical medium of paper? because people still want and like owning things.
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Yea, I like owning things too. Its nice. :D

Seriously though, I don't think this will matter too much, people accept change eventually.
 
People have flocked to MP3's as a medium sans any physical media. I think as long as people have the means to reclaim an electronic item it's perfectly feasible.
In 10 years? I dunno about consoles going away, but I don't think it's that far fetched at all.
There will likely be some kind of universal box that handles everything.
If you go back 10 years from where we are right now, there have been a ton of changes in the way things have been handled.
We're already seeing things like YouTube and OnDemand items replacing or complimenting TV. We have downloadable game services like Steam.
In 10 years, I'm with him.
 
So cell phones and internet TV is going to replace consoles. :rolleyes:

It may happen slowly, but certainly not in 5 to 10 years.
 
Who knows. I just pointed out that Elektronica music thing and somebody else rememberd. At the time I was working in a record/music store so I read all those mags. Now Alternative to me is whoever is on XM Radio #54 Lucy. =/
 
15 years ago we were all playing Sega Genesis and the most powerful game on the PC was Doom. Now we can run Quake 3 in a web browser and Genesis games on a cell-phone.
Technology moves fast and it's gotten even faster in the last 5-6 years.
We've seen 2MB of RAM turn into 4GB of RAM. 28.8 modems are now 20,000K cable lines.
I can't think of the name of it, but there's an online service that lets you play games all the way up to the Saturn/PS1 era via streaming and downloads. Tivo and DVRs along with streaming TV have hit mainstream and will only get bigger.

In 10-15 years, I think you'll be shocked to see how little physical media and there is. TV shows will all be "on demand" but will just premiere on certain nights. Games can/will be handled the same way. Steam has already made this work pretty well. In 10 years, they'll have that perfected.
 
Piping the raw video display content in realtime will never happen. You NEED the physical hardware in the home linked to your controller directly. Any other solution will introduce excessive lag and cut out periodically. Imagine playing a single player game and finding your controls and video feed are suddenly cut at a critical moment due to the internet being invariably unreliable.

They may take away the removable media drive hard drive and stream all content, that I can easily see in the next 10 years, but the raw processing power has to be local and that'll always require a hefty box.
 
Domingo said:
15 years ago we were all playing Sega Genesis and the most powerful game on the PC was Doom. Now we can run Quake 3 in a web browser and Genesis games on a cell-phone.
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this is a good point. it's difficult to predict where we'll be in 10-15 years. what that article suggests is certainly feasible.
 
spine said:
Piping the raw video display content in realtime will never happen. You NEED the physical hardware in the home linked to your controller directly. Any other solution will introduce excessive lag and cut out periodically. Imagine playing a single player game and finding your controls and video feed are suddenly cut at a critical moment due to the internet being invariably unreliable.

They may take away the removable media drive hard drive and stream all content, that I can easily see in the next 10 years, but the raw processing power has to be local and that'll always require a hefty box.
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Took the words right out of my mouth. It would be next to impossible to play some games with the input lag some people would have.
 
FLYING CARS!!!!! Well you never know. I'll be pissed b/c I bought a really nice GMC Sierra and intend to keep it for a while. :)
 
Bob dole said:
I'll be pissed b/c I bought a really nice GMC Sierra and intend to keep it for a while. :)
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You will be pissed that you bought that vehicle if gas prices keep soaring. I know several people with high income that have those gas guzzlers, and they are pissed. Who cares if you can afford it, it's the principle. It's just not worth the money for them, so most of them are trading in for more economical vehicles.
 
spine said:
Piping the raw video display content in realtime will never happen. You NEED the physical hardware in the home linked to your controller directly. Any other solution will introduce excessive lag and cut out periodically. Imagine playing a single player game and finding your controls and video feed are suddenly cut at a critical moment due to the internet being invariably unreliable.

They may take away the removable media drive hard drive and stream all content, that I can easily see in the next 10 years, but the raw processing power has to be local and that'll always require a hefty box.
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Too true, could you imagine the bandwidth requirements needed play Crysis remotely? I seriously doubt our internet infrastructure will be anywhere near able to handle something like that in 10 years. When it comes down to it, you would still need all the cpu/gpu horsepower of a computer/console capable of playing the game in question for each running instance of the game. What are they going to do, network a few million PS3/Wii/360/PC in a building some where and build a nuclear power plant next door? Then wire everyones home with a terabyte connection?

Nearly 100% digital content delivery for games I can believe. But no PC/console, nope don't believe it. I have used many thin clients at many places, when the server is in the same building, they usually just suck, when it is ina cross town or in another city, they are usually total trash for anything more than the simplest of tasks.
 
Nicksterr said:
You will be pissed that you bought that vehicle if gas prices keep soaring. I know several people with high income that have those gas guzzlers, and they are pissed. Who cares if you can afford it, it's the principle. It's just not worth the money for them, so most of them are trading in for more economical vehicles.
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I'd like a car that spits unburt fuel out side exhaust pipes. That would be great!:cool:
 
This is foolish and ignorant of the current state of technology, the national and global economy, and the industry itself.

The technology for broadband in the U.S is poor. http://www.physorg.com/news96708044.html

We had fallen from 12th to 15th last year. We are not competitive in broadband penetration. The fastest consumer broadband we have now is FIOS which is woefully inadequate for supporting video-streaming at 1080p at 60fps. FIOS is still not common to the U.S and is only slowly rolling out to select, high-density regions.

So even if FIOS roll-out finishes, we still don't have the bandwidth for it. Even if a FIOS connection was fast enough, it would need to be fast enough for the average volume of users, which it isn't. See Comcast's throttling to minimize actual average throughput instead of actually providing the advertised or potential speeds. They can't actually support the speeds they advertised because if they offered it, it'd flood their network. They just soak the money instead of investing it in the infrastructure needed to actually support what they sell.

So we would need a new tech to be invented, newer than fiber-optic cables. It needs to be faster. It also needs to be cheaper in order to get rolled out. It needs multi-billion dollar investment to compete against incumbent monopoly telecoms. It needs to have local/state/federal approval to actually build their wires out to the homes. It would then actually have to get built and rolled out across the country to people's houses. This isn't just some quick project, it takes a man and his tools to actually take that connection into each wall.

THEN and only then do you have a MARKET to sell this gaming model. And you need to sell a better product than the incumbent PC and console markets. You also need to sell it cheaper even though you've just bled billions to make it happen. Plus you need to get developers convinced/paidoff to make games on the system.

As a frame of reference, MS while coming close to making a profit, still has not made a profit in gaming. So this far more expensive and far riskier project would need to be funded and managed by someone with more money and resources than /MICROSOFT/. Seeing as how Microsoft is already invested in this console idea, I don't see them jettisoning it anytime soon to make a new, even riskier, competing technology, while taking even more loss.

Let's put it this way. Hi-def streaming on-demand video is still having a bitch of a time rolling out. Cable does not have the bandwidth for 1080p streaming. FIOS might, but as more people sign up for it, that 1080p stream needs to go to more and more people. Gaming streams would be far harder to pull off and just won't happen without an invention of such magnitude and significance that it would rival the invention of the transistor itself.

A more realistic picture of when this might be possible is 50-60 years. Simply thinking of a technology isn't enough, and even if a technology was invented, someone would need to physically make the business and products and get it into homes. The market conditions may simply not exist. You can stream NES games over the internet right now. But right now people are playing Call of Duty 4. So when Call of Duty 4 becomes the relative equivalent of an NES game in computing power, we will be playing Call of Duty 15 and probably won't even give a damn that someone can stream processing for us to play Call of Duty 4. So not only would the stream processing need to be capable of playing a game, it would need to be capable of playing equal or better games than what we can do with the more efficient model of playing it locally and only streaming the necessary synchronization data.
 
Interesting theory. Who really knows where technology will be in 10 or 15 years? Technology has been advancing so fast with very little signs of slowing down. There are often claims of plateau's but then something brand new comes out and it continues to advance. Although bandwidth is moving sort of slow, a tech farm that far in the future seems plausible to me. Would be pretty nifty too. Could minimize piracy, boost or hurt the economy, probably would see a lot of changes in the game development business too in terms of budget, pay, time constraints, freedom.
 
Domingo said:
There will likely be some kind of universal box that handles everything.
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Umm.
It's called a PC.

A PC can do anything.

Consoles are underpowered and overmarketed redundant machines.

No one *NEEDS* a console, unlike a PC.
There is nothing you can do on a console that you can't do on a PC.
However, there are virtually infinite things you can do on a PC that you can not do on a console.

Get rid of the redundancy I say.
Get rid of the console.

Oh, and:
"Consoles as We Know Them are Gone"
 
I forget exactly who said it, but some employee of LucasArts during its adventure game hayday predicted that CD-ROMS wouldn't last and wouldn't catch on at all, that they were too flimsy and what not.

Predictions are nothing more than educated guesses. No one knows shit about the future of gaming or what's to come. All we can do is make educated guesses. To say consoles will die when they are thriving like never before is a bold statement.

I do agree with her saying that software will be increasingly obtained through downloading.
That's an extremely intelligent guess IMO. My best educated guess is that Steam and Steam like services are the future of PC gaming and the main source of obtaining gaming software. Now if we could just find a way to make gaming laptops and desktops more affordable and surpass the needs of newly released software.
 
kelbear said:
So when Call of Duty 4 becomes the relative equivalent of an NES game in computing power, we will be playing Call of Duty 15 and probably won't even give a damn that someone can stream processing for us to play Call of Duty 4.
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Seeing as its an odd number, we'd probably STILL be in WWII on CoD15.
 
TheGooch69 said:
I forget exactly who said it, but some employee of LucasArts during its adventure game hayday predicted that CD-ROMS wouldn't last and wouldn't catch on at all, that they were too flimsy and what not.

Predictions are nothing more than educated guesses. No one knows shit about the future of gaming or what's to come. All we can do is make educated guesses. To say consoles will die when they are thriving like never before is a bold statement.

I do agree with her saying that software will be increasingly obtained through downloading.
That's an extremely intelligent guess IMO. My best educated guess is that Steam and Steam like services are the future of PC gaming and the main source of obtaining gaming software. Now if we could just find a way to make gaming laptops and desktops more affordable and surpass the needs of newly released software.
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While a significant development, Steam has in no way replaced retail. Many people simply want a physical copy of something, and though online distribution may rise, it will never eliminate the actual product.
 
MP3's are coming VERY close to replacing the actual physical music medium. Plus, there's no reason someone couldn't make a physical copy if they really insist on one.

I think everyone's thinking inside the box a little too much. You don't have to look far back to see people claiming everything we have right now "could not happen" or "will not happen."
People are talking about Crysis being this monster that we could never possibly stream and this and that...yet Quake 3 was in that same spot less than 10 years ago (people were BEGGING for 30fps) and now you can play it in a web browser and do that very same thing.

A PC can do anything.

Consoles are underpowered and overmarketed redundant machines.

No one *NEEDS* a console, unlike a PC.
There is nothing you can do on a console that you can't do on a PC.
However, there are virtually infinite things you can do on a PC that you can not do on a console.

Get rid of the redundancy I say.
Get rid of the console.
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This is somewhat true, but there's no one entity behind a PC. Microsoft's really the only close thing. A console has branding behind it and a push behind it. The only thing that keeps PC similar is the OS. We're going to need a lot more unification in that industry. In 10 years I certainly hope someone steps up and makes it happen or something tells me we'll see some sort of media center that functions like a PC...only it's branded and unified like a console.
 
consoles are more and more becoming PC's, period, and this claims sounds like the one MS was making that everythying would be cluster fucked together, your OS, everything would be hosted online... ya., with the internet the way it is now, good luck.

I want to play my games when i want, when i have no internet, i can play et cetera
 
Can't see this happening.

Digital distribution like steam, and having your own liabries of games and media stored offsite on a large server farm is a definate possibility and certainly not outside of reach with current technology.

But remote computing, I don't buy that...the latency involved is a big problem, hell we can't even get reliable VoIP now a days much less pushing anything more complex across the internet.
 
This idea is about more than just replacing physical media, and its ridiculous because there simply isn't an infrastructure in place that can come anywhere close to supporting it. There isn't that kind of network speed or bandwidth anywhere, let alone everywhere. Plus, the success of the wii tells us that there's a whole crapload of people out there who really don't care whatsoever about online gaming. Try convincing them that this model is the way to go...

However, this is definitely a reality for a lot of other types of pc software. Media and office applications are clearly moving towards a more centralized, collaborative server based environment. Games might be the one area where it simply isn't feasible technologically.
 
Bob dole said:
I remember about 10 years ago music as we know it was doomed and was going to be replaced by all elektronica. ie: Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, etc. AP and Rolling Stone were pushing that story hard.

uhhhh that never happened either......
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Well to be honest I thinkk the only original music that came out in the last 10 years were all electronic stuff.

As for the consoles dying, I don't think so.

Digital content is the future, though.
 
I can actually see this happening. I manage my companies 400 server Citrix farm and this is a similar concept. The industry in general is moving towards centralizing complexity and virtualization so sounds like Sandy is right on track. :eek:
 
I still think people are thinking in terms of "NOW" too much and throwing out the possibility of innovations that could revolutionize bandwidth issues. Sure, all of this is impossible with today's technology and attitudes...but who knows where we'll be in 10 years? We could all wake up tomorrow and there could be a method for us to have 100x the bandwidth we have now.
All of this is speculation, but some people seem to be looking at this by seeing what we have today and assuming that all of todays paradigms will be intact in 10 years.
 
Domingo said:
I still think people are thinking in terms of "NOW" too much and throwing out the possibility of innovations that could revolutionize bandwidth issues. Sure, all of this is impossible with today's technology and attitudes...but who knows where we'll be in 10 years? We could all wake up tomorrow and there could be a method for us to have 100x the bandwidth we have now.
All of this is speculation, but some people seem to be looking at this by seeing what we have today and assuming that all of todays paradigms will be intact in 10 years.
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It's not necessarily a matter of bandwidth, but of latency. For example, you're playing your favourite game at 60fps at 1280x1024. Think how much image data that is per frame and you've got 60 a second to deal with. So assume they'd compress it using some video codec. It'd go like this: You press the fire button, that signal gets sent to the server, the server then processes the next game 'frame' (progamming frame), then renders the scene, then compresses that visual scene and sends it back down to you, your shitty cheapo box then decodes it and then draws the frame on your screen.

Can you imagine just how harrowingly laggy would that be?

It'd be like playing a video game on TV using digital TV interactive buttons.
 
theNoid said:
I can actually see this happening. I manage my companies 400 server Citrix farm and this is a similar concept. The industry in general is moving towards centralizing complexity and virtualization so sounds like Sandy is right on track. :eek:
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much easier in a close environment you control %100, the backend and all, your in a completly closed area, nothing from the outside internet can affect your intranet.

Domingo said:
I still think people are thinking in terms of "NOW" too much and throwing out the possibility of innovations that could revolutionize bandwidth issues. Sure, all of this is impossible with today's technology and attitudes...but who knows where we'll be in 10 years? We could all wake up tomorrow and there could be a method for us to have 100x the bandwidth we have now.
All of this is speculation, but some people seem to be looking at this by seeing what we have today and assuming that all of todays paradigms will be intact in 10 years.
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sure, we could wake up to 100x more bandwidth, but could we use it? as said, look at how many ISP are trying to cap high usage people? comcast and such are throttling legit sites, like streaming sites, apple / itunes and other online video service because it costs them money they dont want to spend

100x the bandwidth is already out, go to Asia or Eurpoe where you can get 100Mb line to your door for $50 a month... but not in north america..

I could see this happing in places like asia where the infrastrucute for technology is so new, they have the lastest and greatest right now, and they coould probably do it to some degree, but think of what was said above, how much data per second has to go through... with monitors getting larger... fiorget 1280 x 1024,. i want my 1920 x 1200 with 8xAA and 16x AF ............ we are talking a hella lot of gig's a second for just one person, now calculate in say a 30 person server.............

to go larger - how many people play WOW? how many people play Counter Strike Source.......
 
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