The pros and cons of the digital-only future
A reader gives his views on the impact of smartphones and tablets on gaming, and suggests that a digital-only future is not necessarily a bad one.
Andy_b720 made some interesting points in his feature a few weeks ago. I do however think he has underestimated companies like Microsoft and Sony, who are probably well prepared for the dramatic changes in the industry which are happening right now.
Reading through the Underbox of andy_b720′s feature made it clear that a lot of people only want to play games if they can have a physical device sitting under their TV which plays physical media games. Maybe a lot of these people took his suggestion towards tablet or phone gaming to mean actually solely playing a game on the touchscreen of one of these devices. I didn’t.
Within the next several years it will be probably be possible to have a phone size device as powerful as the next generation of consoles sitting in your pocket streaming games to your TV. You will be able to control these games with a standard controller that will be wirelessly linked to your phone and whilst in play the experience will be no different to playing a game on a home console from a Blu-ray or DVD. What’s more is that these games will still be Xbox and PlayStation games.
This isn’t some random hypothesis, simply the logical progression of technology based on exactly what has happened since the first computer was birthed.
Computer technology has always and will always get faster, smaller and more streamlined. It will continue to converge, it will become more accessible and change to suit the needs and lifestyles of the people who use it.
Physical media will eventually disappear because it is simply more convenient to not have to physically buy, store and use a disc or cartridge.
I currently use Blu-rays to watch my movies. This is because I’m obsessed with picture and sound quality. I could (pay to) download or stream a film to my laptop and connect it to my TV but I don’t because my laptop’s video card won’t process 1080p video at quite the same quality as my Blu-ray player. Most people I know though think I’m mad and quite happily watch new releases streamed or downloaded in frankly awful quality and it doesn’t seem to bother them one iota.
So try telling one of these people that one day they might have to download or stream the next Call Of Duty or FIFA and not have a physical copy to keep or sell on. Their reply will probably be, ‘So what?’
People will even argue that the decline of physical media is an attempt to stamp out second-hand sales. It’s not, the death of second-hand sales will be more of an unintentional by-product of the move away from physical media. I’m not saying it won’t have positive repercussions for publishers and negative ones for consumers, just that these are not the reason a downloadable future is happening. It is simply because technology is, almost of its own accord, moving to fit the needs of the consumers who make up the greatest percentage of its revenue.
Now this is not me saying I’m happy to lose the ability to sell my games on. I wasn’t happy to have to pay for a DVD player and buy movies I already owned when DVDs came out. I’m sure thousands of people who worked in the VCR production industry lost their jobs. But it wasn’t an evil plot by sinister corporations that did this, just side effects of the inevitable transition from one technology to another.
For the last few years people have tried to compare the sale of games to cars. That people would be outraged if they couldn’t sell a car on. Last time I checked cars cost thousands of pounds and are made to last years. Games cost between £20 and £40 new and most go down to around £10 after a year or so. If cars could be downloaded and only cost a fraction of what they do I’m sure people would be happy enough to buy new each time.
But that day will never come, there will never be the equivalent of a download in the car industry so it’s a ridiculous comparison to make. People are not being robbed of the right to sell their game on rather simply losing the ability to sell it on as a new form of media takes over.
The way I see things going is that Sony and Microsoft’s next generation platform won’t be limited to the physical consoles they announce/have announced this year. Microsoft are already playing with SmartGlass technology and I’m betting with the NextBox any screen-based device will be able to be used as an alternative to your TV, Wii U style, for when the TV is in use. Sony still haven’t even showed a physical console and maybe that’s because this generation won’t always require one.
With the current Xbox you can already access your Live account from your phone. I’m assuming the next one will allow you to go even further. Whilst it might not be available from the get go I’d like to think that all you’ll need to play games in the future would be a wireless controller, access to a tablet device or Internet-enabled TV and an account with Sony or Microsoft’s online service. We could still have the physical console under our TV at home but as the generation moves on and the online service becomes more reliable this will become less and less of a necessity.
People will bemoan the reliability of such structures based on the relative unreliability of today’s Internet speeds. I’ve said it before that within the next decade Internet will be just as reliable as your electricity source and so fast they’ll stop even talking about speeds anymore. Already people I know have 4G capable mobiles which stream Internet to their whole house many times faster than my own home broadband.
So rather than the death of home consoles that andy_b720 predicts I think it will be more of a case of the home console becoming invisible. Sony and Microsoft will no longer need to make expensive machines and ship them around the world. They’ll keep that technology in their own HQs and just sell us controllers and online subscriptions. The industry won’t crash because enough people want to play games, big blockbuster games but it will shed its reliability on home-owned technology. This if anything might even make the industry more sustainable from a financial point of view.
There are many things I’ll miss if we eventually move away from the physicality of game and console ownership. I’ll tell my children of the joy of game stores, the smell of instruction books, the endless hours trying to get the cellophane of a new game. I’ll tell them how wonderful it was to unbox a new console, to set it up and sense its power under the TV. I’ll lament about how my shelves used to be filled with rows of games making it easier to show of my manly geekiness to any guests.
There are a lot of things that will make me miss the way things were. But I don’t think I’ll miss them as much as I enjoy playing games themselves. Because that’s what matters to me, playing games. If I’m enjoying the experience I’m far too busy to be thinking about how I bought the game, what technology is powering it or whether I’ll be able to sell it on afterwards. If the game is good, the graphics are great and the controller works well then nothing else really matters to me.
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