It won’t matter whether you play games on a PS3, Wii or Xbox 360, says EA founder Trip Hawkins, because in the future, platforms won’t matter.
Hawkins says that videogame developers need to stop thinking of games as products, and start thinking of them as services, and that platform boundaries would become unimportant, as games became cloud based.
Speaking on Scott Steinberg’s web show Game Theory, Hawkins said that for a long time the industry had a single platform, “winner takes all” focus, but that it was clear that that wasn’t a viable business model any more.
He said that game makers would need to be agile in the future, and not be locked in to developing on any single platform. Ultimately he said, platforms would become irrelevant as people would sign in to the same experience from a variety of different devices, and that the important thing would be making the process simple and convenient.
What Hawkins is describing sounds a lot like services like Onlive or Gaikai, that allow gamers to stream games over the internet. Both services are in their infancy however, and it will take time to get gamers used to the idea of cloud based gaming and to set up the kind of infrastructure that it would require to really supplant existing models.
Source: VG247
