Posted 12.12.2011 at 6:14 pm
7 Comments
Game Cloud
Todd Baxter
When Nintendo launches the Wii U later this year, it will also be launching the next generation of videogame consoles, a group expected to include, as early as 2013, the successors to Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360. In the past, each new crop represented a major leap forward in graphics-rendering power. But there’s not much else manufacturers can do to make pictures more detailed—at least until displays catch up. Instead, they will expand the gaming experience itself.
The breakthrough on the Wii U, for instance, is the oversized controller, which will contain a 6.2-inch touchscreen, speakers, a gyroscope, an accelerometer, and a front-facing camera, all of which can work in concert with the television—or possibly as an independent social-networking portal. Such a device may sound familiar. And indeed, as competing platforms such as the iPad proliferate, console manufacturers are recognizing the need to move the gaming experience beyond a single, fenced-in device. Sony and Microsoft have yet to release specs on their new consoles, but Wanda Meloni, the founder of the gaming research firm M2, says they will most likely involve increased cross-platform capability. Gamers may start a game on their console, for example, but they’ll be able to pick it up again on their smartphone.
That shift will also change how games are published, away from the disc-based model and toward more downloadable and cloud-based content. The extreme of this idea might be OnLive, which releases games exclusively in the cloud, and is hardware-agnostic. (Read more about OnLive here.) What it assuredly won’t do is spell the death of the conventional console franchises: Halo 4, Diablo III and Grand Theft Auto 5 will all ship this year.
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Wii, Wii U, the 'Wii I' and 'Wii Them' will be next.
great, who wants to buy me one, then wait 2 years for them to get cheaper :3
Yay, more cloud content. Until people have truly unlimited download capacity cloud storage can be prohibitively expensive. Who wants to repeatedly pay to download something they already own? Store movies in the cloud and if you reach your bandwidth limit you get to pay your ISP to download it again.
@robloid,
yeah thats why i get my own "content" and save it on my external hard drive. that way no "cloud" is needed. if disc based games are trashed than people will end up spending more money for games. luckily i still have my "fat" ps2 which i modded. it can play burned ps2 games and i can also store games on its hard drive. no streaming needed. no lag either. did i mention that it can play movie files? view pictures and play music? i see onlive becoming big with the less techy people but not with the die hard gamers.... wow people things are changing rather fast....
"religion is like a prison for the seekers of wisdom"
-Killah Priest
I am pretty sure only Canada has "Bandwith Limits" In the USA at least, you pay your ISP on a monthly basis and can use as much bandwith as you want over the course of that month. To get back on topic I honestly think it makes things a whole hell of a lot easier to buy games through the cloud,it is convienant and also costs less.Game designers spend less money on production which makes the game less expensive. It also makes it easier for people to design games themselves and release it ove the cloud as opposed to only large companies having the resources to get thousands of disks made up.
Alright heres the deal if games go entirely on to cloud imagine how easy it would be to simply find an illegal site and download whatever game you wanted? Just like music and movies the entire industry will crash and do you really want that?
Actually one major benefit to the Cloud is that it will help to prevent piracy. If a game is on the Cloud then it is not physically possesed by the user, which means the code can't be altered. There is no downloading in the Cloud, the game never goes to your hard drive. Your machine is simply the window to an application that exsists and is being processed in the Cloud.
Since none of the users will have an actual copy of the application it will be much more difficult to pirate it.
The only real downside to the Cloud is that it requires perpetual internet access and it can have slower responce times (if you have low bandwidth).