By: Tyler Miller
Amongst all the big game announcements and reveals at this year’s E3, there were two things that stood out the most: streaming services and next-gen. Next-gen may not be right around the corner, but it’s on the horizon and will probably be arriving within the next two years, something that gets me very excited. If next-gen means a strong push towards streaming though, that excitement will be replaced with hesitance and fear.
Consoles are meant to be an easy and intuitive way to play video games. They always have been. You pop in the game you want to play and just like that you’re good to go. Although nowadays it’s common to put in a game and be greeted with an update for it, you can still play just about all games without any update from the jump. You may have to deal with some bugs and there may be a feature or two not available because it was included in the Day-1 patch, but the game is still able to be played by you whenever you want. With streaming, things won’t be that simple or easy.
Streaming is all about the internet. Without an internet connection, you can’t stream. Just having an internet connection isn’t enough though. Your connection has to be fast enough to stream properly. Sure you could stream with some bare-minimum internet speeds, but the quality of your experience would suffer. Lower frame rates and resolution are the first things to degrade. Input latency (how quickly your inputs are registered) is also a factor as well. And if your connection fluctuates or drops for any reason, you’ll be kicked out of the game.
There are many gamers that are able to stream games well today, but I’m willing to bet there are just as many, if not more, that are not capable of streaming games well, if they’re able to at all. I myself have great internet in my house, but the internet in the room with my PS4 is pretty bad. Downloads that are approximately 1GB can take 20-30 minutes on a good day, or over an hour on others. If the next generation of consoles pushes streaming as their main way of delivering games, I’ll be forced to skip an entire console cycle, along with many other people.
While internet capabilities are getting better all around the world, it’s currently not in a place where we can support streaming all of our games directly to our console. That’s a future that I don’t see being possible for at least another ten years, and even that might be too soon. I understand why developers and publishers want to push the industry in this direction. Game are becoming very expensive to make, so streaming would allow them to cut out the used games market completely and keep those profits to themselves. They would also be able to get rid of the physical distribution costs. Games are also getting bigger and more demanding. If we were to stream games, developers could add more to their base game than they ever could with a Blu-Ray disc, making the games deeper and more complex than ever before.
Even with these things in mind, I still can’t help but be worried about the future. No specific next-gen plans have been formally announced yet, and not much has leaked either. The closest we got was Phil Spencer saying during the Xbox press conference that they’re already working on the next generation of Xbox consoles. This was followed by reports that the next-gen Xbox would release in 2020, and that Microsoft is working on multiple devices that live in the same ecosystem with the codename Scarlett. Tie this into Phil’s other E3 announcement that the company is creating a streaming service for any device, and it paints a picture of their future plans. One would think they’d learned from their mistakes launching the Xbox One, but it looks like they’re going in that direction yet again.
My fears here could be unfounded, but we only have to look back a few years ago at the reveal of the Xbox One and the internet focused future that they tried to push on us. The fact that they tried to get us to be constantly connected only five years ago causes it to make sense that Microsoft, along with many other publishers, would try and push streaming on us as their vision for the next generation of consoles. I want to have faith that things will be better than what I’m foreseeing, but I can’t help but be pessimistic and imagine nothing but dark days coming for us all.
TheComfySpot 