The writing seems to be very much on the wall for console gaming, and it’s surely only a matter of time before mobile takes over. As a species, we’re moving away from dedicated hardware for the likes of music, movies, and TV shows and it looks like games are next up.
There was so much talk of games streaming this week. Google will announce something to do with gaming at GDC next month, which is rumoured to be a new streaming platform. At Galaxy Unpacked, solid rumours were swirling that the s10 range will support Steam streaming too.
Xbox is also working on bringing Game Pass over to Switch, which opens up the possibility for games like Ori and the Blind Forest and Cuphead on Nintendo’s platform. Other platforms are sure to follow – particularly mobile – and when they do, the Xbox will pretty much become an app instead of a console.
Hardware will likely give way to streaming services
And that’s the likely future for all hardware manufacturers. We’ll likely have separate streaming services from Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Google, and whoever else gets into the streaming game as we move closer towards it.
It just makes so much sense. Why buy expensive hardware every couple of years to play the biggest games when you can just stream them from a super computer? Well, the reason for that right now is down to our internet connections, which are generally still not up to snuff for streaming games.
Developers will also have a much better time with this system, as they won’t have to develop their games for a bunch of different devices. Fortnite, for example, is now available on everything but has to be scaled up or down depending on the platform. Can you imagine how much of a handful that is for Epic?
Any device that supports streaming can then become a games console
When streaming becomes the major platform, any device that is capable of streaming things from smart TVs to mobiles to computers and maybe even smart fridges will become the “consoles” of the future.
We know that there will definitely be another generation of consoles before that happens though. Both Sony and Microsoft have already announced that they’re working on something, both of which are expected to arrived within the next couple of years. Nintendo plans to support the Switch for up to 10 years too.
So we predict that the shift will happen in the next decade. We’ll slowly see games streaming take over, starting with Xbox Game Pass and Google’s whatever, then Sony and Nintendo (maybe) will follow suit.
