Console Upgrades Won't be Tied to Hardware After New Cycle, Says EA

[Rodolphe Kourkenko]

So if i understand correctly: in the next years, harware will not be the most important thing for gaming. It's strange to see a company telling such sentences when it can't stop to tell to everybody how their new engine produce "shinny shinny" graphics with better hardware. Logic ?

They can speak about the "power of the cloud", if this kind of thing should be mandatory in the future, i prefer to follow Valve rather than EA on this path...

 

[FoolKiller]

Part of that evolution, apparently, will be a transition from hardware-driven console cycle to the continuous evolution of game machines powered by software solutions.

Umm.... so a PC?

 

[mad825]

So a guy working for a company which does not make hardware says that the future of gaming is not in hardware. That's kind of like the Pope saying that the future of thought is not in scientific inquiry.

To be fair, hardware development (transistor based) is getting slow and will only continue to get slower. For god knows how long, the home market will be stuck with transistor based technology and the only way to provide heaps of new raw power are from dedicated servers.

 

[seditary]

Remind us how Simcity went EA.

I'll wait.

Captcha: get over it

NEVER!

 

[loc978]

Pretty sure he's talking about cloud computing there... games being a service, and to upgrade the experience, servers get upgraded to compensate for the increased load.

Just a few problems there... until actually high-speed broadband connections are in the home of every potential gamer in the world, his model falls apart. Also, there are those of us who would despise such a system. If he's right, I'm out. No more new games, I'll keep myself busy with my retro backlog.

 

[beez]

Translation: they want to stream you games. Why are they already on that when the technology is just being developed? To kill used games and piracy.

Some of the tech actually works pretty well, but if they want to do this, then the future is shit. Why? We're heading towards 4K already and video streaming games in YouTube quality only means they can get away with cheap tricks they couldn't if the game was actually running on your hardware and you didn't have to bear with all the compression artifacts.

 

[Strazdas]

i'm really sleepy atm but could someone perhaps explain what that means to me in plain English because i think it relates to something i've been talking about in a few recent posts (game streaming) but its so full of gobbledygook that i'm not actually sure.

"gaming granularity"?...aren't we supposed to all want a "dark, rich roast"...

...and someone should probably tell him we're actually heading into the "Gen 8" now...

once again everyone ignored you

What they are very poorly attempting to say is that the thing will slowly move to the internet side if they are allowed to get away with it. from processing on the server to full on streaming of the game. basically what they want is OnLive type of service, where you only need hardware powerfu lenough to stream the thing and thier servers does everything else.
So they want people hto have network capable of streaming it. as in upgrade your damn net connection.

Some of the tech actually works pretty well, but if they want to do this, then the future is shit. Why? We're heading towards 4K already and video streaming games in YouTube quality only means they can get away with cheap tricks they couldn't if the game was actually running on your hardware and you didn't have to bear with all the compression artifacts.

HOld your horses there. This console generation barelly went from 480p to 720p, the PCs still dont have 2K as their deal. Youtube offering 1080p already overshoots plenty of monitor/TV capabilities people have, and as you know they dont want to change that too often. were not there for 4k yet and wont be for some time.

Not to mention it'd pretty much kill the modding scene outright and make franchises like TES pretty much useless... Not to mention awesome games like CK2 and EUIV would never get made with the capability to mod them into even more awesomeness. Just depressing.

Notice something - none of the games you mentioned that "they would kill" are published by EA. as far as they are concerned its a competition to be killed.

 

[beez]

HOld your horses there. This console generation barelly went from 480p to 720p, the PCs still dont have 2K as their deal. Youtube offering 1080p already overshoots plenty of monitor/TV capabilities people have, and as you know they dont want to change that too often. were not there for 4k yet and wont be for some time.

Well, since the last console generation, we went 1080p from VGA and at least one of the manufacturers plan to extend the cycle to at least 10 years, it is pretty much a possibility down the line. Obviously, I'm not talking about 4k next week.