The future of video games may no longer involve consoles

Thorn, Angry Birds is basically an arcade game and a simple puzzle game. Are you saying that you don't enjoy arcade games or simple puzzle games? Are you saying that, say, you don't like Tetris?

I disliked casual games like Tetris before classifications like "casual games" existed.

And yes, the reasons I've never liked Tetris line up very well with the reasons I don't like the so-called "casual games".

edited 23rd Sep '12 11:13:23 PM by Sabbo

Games like Angry Birds tend to be timesinks, is the thing.

Tetris came out in 1984

I'm not saying these games dont have some value, but I don't like how they're essentially becoming the big future of gaming.

Also iOS gaming is allowing devs to make cheap shitty games. Like Megaman Over.

edited 24th Sep '12 12:45:54 AM by Thorn14

There's always going to be the audience that wants the "hardcore" experience you can only get from games like Skyrim, and the "medium core" experience you can get from downloadable action games like, say, the recent Double Dragon Neon. That audience won't disappear. They'll go wherever the games they want are, and the industry has noted that sales of high-end games (the $60 ones) have made more money than sales of smartphone games overall, so the premium audience certainly exists.

I'm saying that if we get to the future I predict, in which TV sets have their own built-in operating system likely based on the already-existing Android OS, and supporting a game controller (thus putting controllers in the hands of people who don't normally play games), and an online store that advertises games alongside TV shows and movies (thus promoting games to people who might otherwise ignore them), there could be an increase in gamers. And the Skyrim, etc. hardcore audience will be playing games they can download to their TV set instead of on a console.

Why are you talking about "TV with an operating system" as if they don't exist yet? I'm using a "TV with an operating system" right now, which is also a music player, a word processor, a calculator, a compiler, a gaming platform, an image editor, a "streamer", a storage system, etc.

What do you mean? Your TV has a word processor and calculator and such? What is it?

If that's the case, all the more reason for Google to target TVs with their Android operating system.

@Title: Eh, as long as there will be handhelds and games using game pads, I'll be fine

edited 24th Sep '12 6:26:26 AM by SpookyMask

It's called a PC. P Cs can do everything that T Vs, consoles and I daresay even smartphones can with the only differences being the form factor and input system - and there are peripherals for all those aspects as well. If you need your all in one device to be a bit more portable then get a laptop.

The only way for other types of devices to even approach the versatility of P Cs is to make them pseudo-P Cs.

That's what a TV with a control setup and an OS would be- a blown up netbook.

edited 24th Sep '12 4:36:13 PM by Recon5

More or less. Thing is, people expect a TV to work differently than a PC. Most people do not hook their PCs up to screens very far away from them, but instead to a screen right in front of them. And a TV is something meant to be shared with an audience. While watching shows and movies on your computer appeals to people who are by themselves, most people would not invite family and/or friends to crowd around a PC monitor.

So with the set-top boxes that are being made for TVs, I can see them gradually moving towards an operating system that includes more PC-like functions, and possibly uses a controller, allowing ultimately for video games to be purchased and played on the TV via the TV's own interface.

Yup. And we may get there at some point. When we do, game consoles as we know them will totally cease to be.

edited 24th Sep '12 5:27:53 PM by BonsaiForest

I think consoles are an inherently limited platform. At least, multiple consoles, which individually cost several hundred dollars, with games only particular consoles can play anyway.

Anything is limited, no matter what people say otherwise.

Saying that people wouldn't be willing to watch something on a PC monitor is a baseless assumption. Besides, you can hook a laptop up to a TV and use that as a giant monitor, thus making the TV-with-OS-so-one-can-share-things part completely meaningless.

Also, people hate being confused by pack-ins, so forget about using a game controller to control a TV (unless it's something like the Wii U Game Pad, which uses the console to help control TV functions). People would just ask why there wasn't a game console that came with the controller.

Oddly enough, my laptop came with a remote control...

Air? Well, whatever, we don't need to limit things artificially.

Air is actually a lot more limited than you'd think, especially with all the pollution that gets pumped into it.

If people wonder "where's the game system that comes with the controller", the answer of course would be their set-top box or TV.

And the ability to hook a laptop up to a TV is a very good one, though for convenience sake, I think many people would rather have a very simple solution. I do still see a future where the set-top box will essentially replace any non-handheld, minus PC desktops, which will still have considerable use in offices and homes.

Something else was just thrown into the mix: Cable companies plan to stream games to consumers via their cable box.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/09/report-cable-companies-planning-to-stream-games-to-subscribers/

Threat to their business model indeed. I also don't like the idea of not having the game physically on your machine, and what if the game is no longer offered to customers? Also, goodbye modding. Still, I can see why cable companies want to do this. Game systems are used by "cord-cutters" to watch TV shows and movies without need of a cable box. They're actually competition for traditional TV. So traditional TV is fighting back, competing against games.

Good luck with that.

Yeah, OnLive was a disaster, and I'm very glad. But if the tech gets better, internet/TV connections get better and more reliable, then it could work and be a threat to game consoles. If not, then I still foresee a future in which set-top boxes download games and play them using some operating system that's standard, like either Windows (as the rumored Steam Box was supposed to) or Android.

I don't see it ever working, really. Better algorithms would improve the compression and decompression speed, but even then, you'd be still be fighting with the latency of the pipeline. Better connection speeds would help with this to a point ( though not infinitely so ), but faster connections are also more expensive connections. Plus, the more sophisticated the compression algorithm ( to make the system bandwidth efficient ), the more compute load you put on the receiving computer.

I just don't see there being a sufficient market for streamed gaming, since the newest cutting edge games wherein someone might want to play them without needing a cutting edge computer? Are going to be the games that run into the latency and bandwidth problems the most.

My cable company already provides a channel that has arcade-like games on it, like Bejeweled and some billiards game. So if you wanna get technical, it's already happened, sort of.

You would have hated the 1980s then. Games then were "casual" by today's standards. Super Mario Bros for the NES can be beaten in as little as an hour and it's nowhere near uber hard. (And it's the highest selling game in history by volume.)

Same thing was still around in the SNES/Genesis days. Super Metroid for instance took less than an afternoon to do a clear. You could do every game/mini-game in Kirby Super Star in a day. (Every single one!) The first three Sonic The Hedgehog games could be beaten in at most three to six hours depending on your skill.

I remember those days very well. Angry Birds with its simplistic gameplay would not have been out of place on the original Game Boy or even worse the arcades (prior to 1983...).

I still say Angry Birds is just a glorified arcade puzzle game, but I wouldn't want it any other way.

I'm not sure it's completely pertinent to the conversation, but as far as unifying computers and television, many of my friends use their computers as media players for the living room via a multi-screen, multi-speaker setup.

Many of them still have consoles though, thanks to console-exclusive titles and such.

I'd actually be doing that myself if I had better equipment.