Ubisoft CEO believes streaming will make consoles extinct

Shawn Knight

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Experts at one time proclaimed PC gamers were a dying breed, threatened by everything from piracy / poorly implemented DRM, a new generation of consoles and even mobile gaming.

Yet here we sit in mid-2016 with an impressive catalog of PC games to choose from, an excellent digital distribution platform in Steam, support for DirectX 12 in Windows 10 and some insanely powerful new graphics cards just around the bend.

If anything, the future of console gaming is in question, at least according to Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot who weighed in on the matter during a recent earnings call.

The executive said he believes there will be another traditional hardware cycle from manufacturers. Guillemot added that they believe in streaming but noted that because it demands a lot of bandwidth, it will still take a bit more time to become popular.

When probed about mid-cycle hardware like the rumored PlayStation 4.5, Guillemot said there’s nothing official on the matter so his expectation is that there will be another cycle of consoles before we move to streaming. He said the last transition (to current generation consoles) was very smooth so they don’t see a reason why transitioning to new hardware again would be a problem. If anything, he said, it would be more of a way to boost the market.

As GameSpot highlights, Guillemot isn’t the first in the industry to speak on the matter.

EA executive Peter Moore said earlier this month that the rise of streaming may signal the end of traditional consoles. He said that in the future, if you want to play Battlefield 12 with a friend, you’ll just jump into a game via whatever monitor you happen to have in your house.

Tekken boss Katsuhiro Harada said the same thing in 2013, suggesting gaming would be as simple as picking up a controller and sitting in front of a monitor.

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When I am not repairing someone's PC, I game on my own appx 40-50 hours a week. Streaming? I've never streamed 1 game in my life, and never will again! I despised the on-line gaming nightmare. Absolutely hated it, and will NEVER buy any game that I've got to go online to use. What a rip off joke that concept is! If I want to play something I do not want to need my internet to use it.
 
Well spoken! Apparently the old fellow didn't bother to actually survey the gaming community. I personally don't care much for streaming because of the wide variety of speeds and those that can't afford or have no access to truly high speed shouldn't be made to suffer for it. Shoot, give me old Sid Meier's GOLF any day!
 
Pretty bold statement. I don't see it happening. It's not just the game, but Sony and MS make a ton of dough from peripherals, upgrades and other services those consoles offer. They're not going to give that up lightly.
 
Could streaming games supplement console gaming? Yes. Replace? No way in hell. This guy must be on that good stuff.
 
When I am not repairing someone's PC, I game on my own appx 40-50 hours a week. Streaming? I've never streamed 1 game in my life, and never will again! I despised the on-line gaming nightmare. Absolutely hated it, and will NEVER buy any game that I've got to go online to use. What a rip off joke that concept is! If I want to play something I do not want to need my internet to use it.
streaming can be within your own intranet.. it doesn't need the internet..
 
Considering in-home streaming is barely viable due to input lag, streaming over ther internet won't happen without decades of infrastructure improvements.
 
Someone needs to tell these executives to keep their out-of-touch pipe dreams to themselves and just cater to what the consumers are actually demanding. You don't run a business by shoving down your unresearched 'vision' on others, you do by satisfying the consumers' needs. Jeez.
 
For someone with no experience streaming a game you sure seem to have a lot of hate for it. I stream my PS4 to my PC and I occasionally use nvidia grid on my shield tablet to play triple A games on a tablet in High Quality and resolution
 
Give everyone (literally EVERYONE) a Gigabit connection at a faire price, then I'll consider the idea. As of right now, with how bad online videos are being compressed, I don't want to see how bad they would sabotage a game with abusive compression.
 
I doubt it will ever happen. I stream using gamestream just downstairs and I get latency issues at times
Give everyone (literally EVERYONE) a Gigabit connection at a faire price, then I'll consider the idea. As of right now, with how bad online videos are being compressed, I don't want to see how bad they would sabotage a game with abusive compression.


Not all online video is compressed poorly. Hvec on netflix is looking pretty sharp. Anyways its not so much the Compression that's the issue but more input lag. On a side not they say it will make consoles extinct so what device are they planning on using to perform this stream?
 
Streaming won't take off until the Telecoms spread fiber across the planet. Until then... streaming video games will be a series of constant latency issues, low bandwidth, and data caps. The only hope right now is Google since they're the only major tech company pushing for fiber optics.
 
Africa will be left out of it, we will be stuck on old gen forever or get back to PC... the speeds are improving on this side of the world but it would take ages for us and I love hard-copy of everything.

Can't buy the streaming idea for games...
 
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