General manager of GeForce Grid Cloud Gaming at Nvidia, Phil Eisler told VentureBeat in an interview that he believes the next-gen is the end for consoles – a notion others have been saying for years.
"They say this is the last console, and I am certainly a believer in that. The last one is almost 10 years old now in terms of the technology."
Eisler believes like many that cloud gaming is the future, despite the fact that OnLive went belly up last August after running out of money. Eisler figures that the issues that currently exist are all solvable and will be resolved gradually as time goes on.
"As we go through time, the good thing about cloud gaming is it’s going to get better every year," says Eisler. "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. 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."
Eisler doesn't believe that people want to deal with physical media anymore. Which, when you look at how most people play music nowadays, definitely has some legitimacy.
"You can put out multiple Blu-ray discs, but who wants to jockey discs anymore? People don’t want discs in their lives anymore. They want to download everything, and when you’re downloading that kind of stuff, it takes a long time. So we’re also pushing the ability, of course, to play instantly. You don’t have to download anything. You don’t have to update any patches. It’s all maintained for you. You just play."
Sounds pretty good doesn't it? But one has to wonder what will happen to companies like Nintendo who very much rely on console and game sales to stay afloat. Sony on the other hand may already have plans to keep up with technology.What do you think? Is cloud gaming the future?
