The next-gen consoles from Microsoft and Sony could be the swan song of the home gaming consoles as we know it. Cloud gaming is becoming increasingly the way to go, and the Xbox 720 and PlayStation 4 may be the crossover platforms to help introduce cloud gaming to the mainstream audience.
Gamesbeat recently interviewed Nvidia's general manager of GeForce Grid Cloud Gaming Phil Eisler, and he stressed cloud gaming is a "disruptive" technology that should be the next step forward.
"The good thing about cloud gaming is it's going to get better every year. One of the reasons we're investing in it is we see that there are some issues today, but they're all solvable, and they're all moving in the right direction," Eisler told Gamesbeat.
"Bandwidth is going up. The cost of server rooms is going down. We're bringing latency down. The experience will just get better and better every year, to the point where I think it will become the predominant way that people play games," he added.
Despite the recent collapse of OnLive, the largest cloud-gaming service to date, there are good signs that the industry isn't dead, but rather just beginning. Sony purchased cloud-gaming service Gakai for $380 million earlier this year, which could point to Sony's interest in bringing a more robust cloud infrastructure to its next-gen PlayStation. Microsoft and Agawi also announced that they would be bringing cloud gaming to Windows 8.
"I have not green lit one game to be developed as a single-player experience. Today, all of our games include online applications and digital services that make them live 24/7/365." Electronics Arts (EA) Labels president Frank Gibeau wrote earlier in a promotional pamphlet for the Cloud Gaming USA conference.
There is still no evidence that we won't be saying next-games on discs, but as time moves on, expect cloud gaming to become the norm as people will increasingly pick up where they left off on their home television on their mobile devices as they go on out the door, and expect the next-gen Xbox and PlayStation to play a huge role in bringing about that experience.