Cloud Gaming – fear not, only if the offer will be global
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I read an interesting article about future platforms in gaming. Square-Enix Executive Yoichi Wada says nothing new, but reminds that “Cloud Computing” will impact heavily also Game Industry.
Social and browser based games will grow dramatically Mr Wada says and Polish Gaming Magazine “Polygamia” fears that if it becomes true, real hardcore gamer related genres will unfortunately die unpopular to all these 10-minutes long game-play browser,facebook, mobile alike alternatives.
I fear not such a thing. Today proves that RIA (Both in Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s Flash applications) can handle sophisticated 3D engines. What they mostly lack is hardware acceleration and good tool-set back-end for game industry. But still I can play Quake in a browser. Browser, mobile and other you’d think small games grow in size and maturity. I can’t imagine how far it can go in the future but for sure I’m not expecting another Mafia or Farmville clones from Facebook as dominant examples in Cloud Gaming AD 2020.
What I expect is usage of local hardware (GPU, CPU) in some Internet aware device where 100% of the content will be streamlined from the Web. Natural, further evolution of what we have now, don’t you agree? I’m expecting that not hardware capacities but social networking power can be major trigger for new customer acquisition and that’s what have already started, big time!
Today’s hardware and technologies allow us to make it all what Square-Enix’s executive says even now. RIA games grow in size and maturity in amazing speed. Blocker is market readiness to accept dramatical shift in mindset (own versus use) so fast. Industry leaders need to evangelize consumers on that and in fact that are Mr. Wada’s motives in my opinion.
I’m personally not that afraid of shift itself. I’m afraid of equal offer available globally. I do not live in US and I perceive that many services are US and at general a particular country centric. Well educated consumer in Web 2.0 era thinks globally and gets benefits from that.
If a local store cannot offer good price and Dollar is cheap, I make a decision to import something even from Australia. It sounds absurd to my parents but to friends in my age that’s natural decision making.
If service is not available and it is definitely attractive people start cheating. That’s the case of Xbox Live in Poland. That’s the business of all commercial VPNs who allow people to freely utilize treasures of Netflix and have Sky TV over Internet.
As a vendor you can’t possibly block motivated user from evaluating you. They’ll bitch at you (as Polish Xbox users do every time they have good ground to speak), but still they will use it. In Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing era there is no such thing like “not available to you” for whatever reason.
November 29th, 2009 at 11:58
Looking back at the track record of the entertainment industry / content providers leaves one, unfortunately, somewhat skeptical.
Just reflect on DVD and Blu-ray region coding, selective availability in online MP3 stores, ditto for streaming television, and so on. Regardless of whether the underlying purpose is to have differential pricing or to control the distribution channel, or to just control for control’s sake, or something else, the desire to restrict availability exists and is going strong.
In the cloud case, assuming the user will simply have a dumb terminal (which is what most cloud cases seem to be aiming for), the “hands-on power” available to the user will lessen and shift more towards the cloud. This creates an asymmetrical situation, where almost all control will be available to the entity owning the cloud. The owner of the cloud will have the power, and there simply will not be that many ways for a user to do anything about the “not available to you”.
In summary: I think overall the “not available to you” will be even more common in the cloud case, without the user being able to do anything about it.