Is the current generation of consoles driven to their limit by the current software? As a corrective glasses wearer I’m not overly impressed with 3D. I find it more of a distraction.

Likewise, a game console is cheaper than a high speed internet connection for the millions of avid video game players in remote places like Idaho, Montana and even parts of Indiana.

In the short term, broadband connectivity in remote areas
is very expensive and in many places terrestrial broadband is simply not available at all. These areas are too large of a market for the likes of Microsoft, Sony and
Nintendo to ignore. Until that is remedied consoles will continue to be the de facto video gaming standard.

In the long term, chips keep getting cheaper. $200 will buy you a lot more performance tomorrow than it ever could today. With this generation we’ve already begun to plateau where performance no longer limits the experiences game authors can create. This means that prices will drop soon and rapidly, possibly even with the very next generation of consoles. We’ve already seen this effect with the Wii being a marginally faster Gamecube and the Xbox 360′s intended 10 year lifespan. If Nintendo had followed through on their intent to make the Wii cost $50 we would have seen sub-$100 Xbox 360s. Picture a future with games including consoles, rather than consoles including games.

This leaves one question, why on Earth would anyone want to trade their already nearly disposable consoles in for high latency games on unreliable remote servers, either now or in the future?

I can only imagine how taxed the servers would be with millions of people trying to download the latest Call of Duty on the day of it’s release (on multiple platforms too). If it’s anything remotely close to what happened when iOS5 was released and error 3200 was the pop up some people saw for hours while trying to download it – I want no parts of that. And that was a relatively small file compared to the 1.5GB – 3GB file size of a full game. The forums and blogs would be lit up -

Issues like broadband coverage and the availability of bandwidth to handle the streams need to be addressed massively, also the lag from the controller to the cloud servers and the return stream is still far too long for any serious gamer to put up with.

We all know Microsoft’s strategy looks like becoming a total home entertainment platform, streaming TV, movies, DVR functionality, Kinect gesture and voice control + the core gaming seems like the next obvious step, let’s not put it past either Microsoft or Sony to be working a platform that could play games locally from physical media/downloaded installations but also be looking at a cloud gaming solution through a subscription service like OnLive that could launch either alongside or later in the lifecycle of the consoles

Cell phone and tablet technology is leading the field and
leaving consoles in the dust. Console gaming has hit “the wall”. HD, we have
it; 3D, we have it; motion input, we have it; streaming content, we have it.
The “next big thing” in technology, no one knows. Where do we go from here? Nintendo
has taken the 1st step, with the Wii U. The goal, true portable console
gaming. Have the power of the next gen PS3/360 portable, with abilities to
stream A/V directly to home entertainment units.

The hardware that we use, including mobile devices like phones and tablets is/are becoming extremely sophisticated. Visually and technically sophisticated games are nearing a point where they will adequately convey their stories and be playable on even the cheapest and simplest of devices sooner than you think. The MOST sophisticated simulations will be able to be cloud based, with the rendering done on hardware you will never see and you will simply pay for the experience not the hardware that runs it.

There is a very distinct difference between digital content delivery (digital distribution), which is not process dependent and can take as long as it needs to complete a download of a purchased game, add-on, or application, and processing a game or application remotely but delivering the active experience to the user’s display with minimal or no specific hardware. Onlive claims to be able to deliver state-of-the-art, graphically compelling gaming experiences now using little to no local hardware and even claim to be able to integrate current gen consoles. However, everything I’ve read leads me to believe this tech is too dependent on the connection, and that multiplayer is limited to only other Onlive subscribers which are few and far between.

I believe what the author of this article is trying to put across is the idea of a cloud gaming platform similar to Onlive becoming the next gen. This would require user’s to have broadband connections far superior to what most currently use at home. In my opinion, a solid cloud platform is at least one generation away due to most people having limited or minimal connections and better ones not being available or affordable in most cases in the US. Not to mention the lack of local single player options without a connection.

The problem lies in the hardware needed to run games.  Your TV may have the capability of downloading MW3, but will it have the processing power to push it at 30 FPS?  You’re talking about having components that currently make up a console (CPU, GPU, RAM, maybe a small HD of some kind, etc) existing directly in the TV.  While certainly possible, it doesn’t exist now and by the time such tech is introduced, MS, Sony, and Nintendo will be on to their next platforms.  It is a neat thought, though.

Consoles play directly into the ultrabook frenzy – you don’t need gaming behemoths to play most video games, because they’re being covered by a slew of different “consoles” from tablets to phones to actual consoles.

Console games might be a different story. But the cheap, relatively reliable hardware will do away with “computer gaming” and that hardware before the opposite happens.

And, cloud services cost a lot and won’t play to previously bought games. But, without backwards compatibility to games I already own, It’ll take at least a “console generation” before cloud is the way to go – unless I can take my XBOX 360 games and PS3 games and enter the codes online.

Umm…we already do that today! It’s actually my preferred method because I hate changing disks every time I want to play a game (my kids put their games in CONSTANTLY!).

You can’t live in a small town in Nebraska and get enough bandwidth to download any of the epic titles that are available, as big as they are, in any reasonable period of time… and yes, I hear there are gamers in small-town Nebraska.

Either way, I don’t want to have to buy a new TV to be able to play new games if they integrate with the TV. I also don’t want to buy 3 TVs for the same room so that I have access to exclusive content for each different TV manufacturer. 

What I see more likely happening is that the TV will become a partner to the console more so than just a dumb screen. The TV will have its own OS, its own gaming platform, and you can plug supplementary hardware onto it from gaming manufacturers that will act as a performance enhancer and media loading location. Kind of like the Ubuntu TV on a USB dongle that was recently released, but more geared towards sharing CPU and GPU performance.

We will see desktop PCs go away before we see the “gaming console” go away.

Weather you like it or not cloud is the future and it will be standard.