In recent years, as is well known, the market for films and TV series has radically changed: it happens more and more often, in fact, that large productions prefer to bring their products to streaming services, rather than to the cinema or to some traditional television network. . It has been a change driven above all by technological improvement, which has allowed millions of people to enjoy smooth, high-definition streaming, comparable to reproductions of a DVD or a blu-ray. Many experts and insiders wonder if the same is going to happen to the video game industry.
For example, the Financial Times asked this, trying to imagine what the future of consoles could be. The two most important consoles on the market – PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, produced by Sony and Microsoft respectively – came out five years ago, quite a long time for the life cycle of today's technological devices, and the next versions could be very different. from those we know today. In October, for example, Microsoft announced that it was working on a new project, called xCloud, which will allow you to play Xbox titles in streaming on smartphones and tablets, without the need to own a console.
With the arrival of streaming games – a sector also known as cloud gaming – video games are about to undergo “the greatest transformation since the arrival of smartphone games,” according to Candice Mudrick, analyst at Newzoo, a research group on the video game industry. , and traditional console makers are likely to end up like Blockbuster after Netflix's arrival. The prerequisite for cloud gaming to take the place of physical or downloaded games is that internet connections become faster and faster, but something is already beginning to be seen.
In Japan, which has the fastest broadband connection of any G7 country, the game Assassin's Creed Odyssey has been streamed to the Nintendo Switch, the third-largest console in the world after PlayStation 4 and Xbox. The fact that it came out on the Nintendo console is no coincidence: the Switch has in fact focused since its arrival on the market, in 2017, not so much on its graphic power – incomparable with that of its competitors – but on the gaming experience. offer. The graphics of Assassin's Creed Odyssey played in streaming are certainly not of the level of the same game played on PC or console, but those who play are not only looking for the quality of the graphics. This is demonstrated by the example of Fortnite, the most popular video game of the last year. Graphically it is not comparable to many other games, but it is not the graphics behind its success, but everything around it, from being able to download it for free and play it without spending anything, to the possibility of challenging your friends online.
Cloud gaming is also viewed with particular attention by those who are not part of the video game industry, such as streaming movie and TV series services. The success of games like Fortnite, playable on any console, shows that in the future games could be increasingly unrelated to a single piece of hardware, and services like Netflix and Hulu, which already have a solid track record in the streaming sector, could become competitors of giants like PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo.
In the future, technological advances will probably allow us to do without a console: we will be able to choose to play a video game just as today we choose to see a movie rather than another on Netflix, that is simply through a screen and a fast internet connection. At the moment, however, a device connected to a TV continues to be the best way to fully enjoy the experience of a game: while the experimentation of streaming games continues, consoles do not seem to be in a moment of crisis.
In general, sales of packaged video games have dropped dramatically in recent years – going from 600 million in 2008 to 290 million expected for this year – but there have been a few individual games that alone are allowing consoles to continue selling. This is the case of Red Dead Redemption 2, of which 17 million copies were sold in just 12 days of release. Thanks to Red Dead Redemption 2, last November 23, Sony recorded the second best year of sales of PlayStation 4 for “Black Friday”, a figure that would be impressive for any technological product but it is even more so for a console in its sixth year of life, which in any other sector would be considered old.
