Man, I could say I knew it! for a lot of things from this GDC year.
First, the OnLive thing. It’s everywhere on my game feeds. As Gamasutra says:
“The ambitious venture, which hopes to revolutionize the gaming world by removing the need to continually upgrade PC hardware or buy new gaming consoles every generation, makes use of cloud computing — doing all of the game’s video and audio processing on remote servers, then streaming the resultant images and sound back to the user quickly enough to play games in real time.”
You can watch the conference here. It demoed a Crysis play session on a Dell studio 15, the one I use to type this post. When I play some Valve stuff, the laptop is getting like a hoover and I just can’t stand it.
Some days ago I was talking about Asus and cheap PCs. For those platforms I was thinking about casual and not heavy raw power demanding games of course. But with a service like OnLive, it could be every games.
Imagine playing games from the eee keyboard, co-op mode with eee sticks, unplugging and plugging from screens to screens without worrying about technical shit.. The NAS could be a great memory cache for the service etc At last, an open/closed easy and limitless platform to play and develop for. From the double consumer/developer view, it’s heaven.
There’s still a lot to solve from a technical perspective for the heavier games but it’s very promising and sure is the future.
The main attract for me is the spectator value. I love to watch people play, I have countless hours of HLTV with SoGamed –when the site was red and black-, or on the couch analyzing my buddies playing consoles. For the spread of the medium, of the gameplay experience of the game culture it can’t be done more easily than with channels to switch like on the familiar TV set.
It’s really exciting.
One famous analyst said that it would be the last console generation. Sorry dude, I said the same a year ago (can’t show you my archives are still broken). Now I guess Nintendo would move to the cloud as soon as they can –in Nintendo terms, when it’s making money for them from day one- with a new Wii, competing OnLive. MS/Sony would follow. Look at how the giant of the electronic is doing well thanks to the N1 number crushing beast aka DQ:
here are the February NPD’s:
Wii–753,000
360–391,000
PS3–276,000
PS2–131,000
There are plenty of ways to look at that data, and if you’re Sony, they’re all bad. PS2 and PS3 sales combined, which have been a hallmark of post-announcement PR spin, were down 35% compared to 2008. PS3 sales were roughly flat (276k vs. 281k in 2008), but in February of 2008, PS3 unit sales accounted for 29% of next-gen (360, PS3, Wii) console sales. This year? 19.4%. So Sony’s PS3 sales stayed flat in a month with much higher next-gen unit sales overall.
Oh, and PSP sales? Down over 18% in February compared to last year.
Combined, and there’s only one word to describe that: freefall.
I mean the two monsters consoles are struggling to make money. For real. At a big, big expense. Software is moving so fast, it’s quite sure they can’t keep up with PCs and cloud computing. So.. Yeah. Good news for everyone that counts in the equation: this generation is going to last very long, and developers should be free to go for the digital distribution on computers called personal computers.
In an older post I was writing:
“This year once again north guys are at it (meanwhile they were around for years): Erik Svedäng from Blueberry Garden fame which has never really had a fame BUT the game always seduced me (audio atmosphere, physics, simplicity I’m sold!), here’s the trailer.”
Blueberry Garden won the IGF! Awesome. I knew this game had something especially charming. Good luck for the full production Erik! And really, these guys from the north ROCK.
More on GDC after grokking more.