Well hold on to your consoles boys and girls, if Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot’s Nostradamus-like prediction come to fruition, then the PS5 and Next Xbox (NextBox anyone?) will be the last of their kind.
So has Yves figured something out about TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It) that he’s now just sharing with us? Has he discovered that the threat of Global Warming is a lot more severe than first thought, and the majority of the world’s land-mass will be swamped with sea water? Is the end nigh!?
No. It’s a lot less dramatic than all of that. But only just. GameSpot transcribed an earnings call, whereby Mr Guillemot expects the gaming industry, specifically consoles, to be changed after the next generation of consoles is released. So don’t expect these changes any time soon. He is quoted as saying:
“”Now on the console side, we expect there will be new consoles that are going to make this market continue to grow and we feel it’s… we’ll still have another generation of consoles before we have new types of consoles coming to the market,
“”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. 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.
“And I feel that last transition was very smooth and the volume that was bought by consumers was very high quickly so we don’t see transition now as a potential problem; we see that as more of a way to boost the market.”
However this isn’t an isolated comment from one big name in gaming, EA’s Peter Moore and Tekken’s Katsuhiro Harada have said similar things in the past, but again not believing any of the changes will be overnight, nor in the near future.
There is a growing feeling in the games industry therefore that home-based hardware will be a thing of the past. That gaming will take place solely online – whether you’re playing alone or not.
Is this a sentiment that is shared by gamers themselves though? We’d love to see what you have to say on the matter, tell us your views in the comments below or on the RGM Forums!
