It’s something of a regular occurrence, the proclamation that consoles are going away.
Here’s Peter Vesterbacka of Rovio, makers of Angry Birds:
… as mobile gaming (including games on tablet devices like the iPad) continues to grow, console games are “dying”. Vesterbacka scoffed at the traditional model where companies charge $40 to $50 for a game that’s difficult to upgrade.
(From Venturebeat.)
Certainly, we are at an uncertain time – the current console generation has a longer lifetime than previous consoles, and Sony and Microsoft are releasing incremental upgrades with the Move and Kinect. All of the buzz concentrates on mobile and social games, yet a handful of big-budget titles in the Red Dead Redemption and Modern Warfare 2-class continue to generate huge sales. But the old threat to consoles (PCs and Macs) hasn’t disappeared either.
Will consoles go away? Only when some other device that people already have (computers, cell phones, tablets, built-in TV functionality, set top boxes) easily provides a living room experience on the big TV with good controllers. Nothing is quite there yet, but could it happen?
Not to forget that the current generation of console is basically as bad if not worse than traditional computers to deal with: updates, and making room for games on your hard-drive etc
That trend plus the fact that the business model is clearly not suitable for any modern game development, well I agree with Peter here :)
It’s all about computers and “largest platforms pool using the same code” that are going to expand in the next decade…
@harold
Yes, it’s interesting how consoles seem to have lost the “console simplicity” that they used to have.
At least he used scarequotes, I guess. Maybe “dying” means “not really dying.”
@Ian Perhaps his comment applies to a distant future in which consoles are so advanced that they can be considered “alive”?