EA - Peter Moore's Thoughts on the Future

@The Daily Orange According to EA Chief Peter Moore consoles will be replaced by streaming technology, mobile is huge and getting bigger, e-sports are becoming real sports and vr will be a major part of gaming eventually.

Similar to how it's changed television and video media in general, streaming is likely going change the way people play games. Moore envisions a future in which there will be no game console. It seems that the only physical thing gamers will own is a monitor of some sort, a flash drive-like device and a controller.

"I'm not sure there will be consoles, as we know them anymore," Moore said. "Games will be accessed by streaming technology, so we don't need hardware intermediaries in between the two. If you and I want to play ‘Battlefield 12' against each other, we'll just jump into a game via whatever monitor we happen to have in our homes. It'll be on a chip, rather than in a box."

He added that the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are well set up to advance as technology does, so we may never see another console produced by Microsoft or Sony ever again.

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More information.

Yeah I heard these predictions years ago and they never came true. Maybe I should become an analyst, and tell everyone what I think will happen to make a quick buck.

Couchpotato said:

Yeah I heard these predictions years ago and they never came true. Maybe I should become an analyst, and tell everyone what I think will happen to make a quick buck.

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Works for Peter Moore. I always find it interesting as to where EA thinks the market may be heading because its the germ of there business decisions.

If the next Dragon Age was a streaming technology game what would that mean for consumers who bought it? It would mean your effectively renting the game as long as EA is willing to stream it/you have internet access it would seem.

Silver said:

Works for Peter Moore. I always find it interesting as to where EA thinks the market may be heading because its the germ of there business decisions.

If the next Dragon Age was a streaming technology game what would that mean for consumers who bought it? It would mean your effectively renting the game as long as EA is willing to stream it/you have internet access it would seem.

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Renting instead of buying has always been something publishers have wanted. A few years back two cloud based companies were the future, and one went bankrupt.

So the only prediction of Moore's I agree with is that VR will slowly change the entire gaming industry. Yet that wont happen til at least 10-15 more years from now.

I'm old school and I like owning things. I still even look for games the come in boxes… and rarer yet, come with printed manuals. I like the idea that once I've paid the game is forever mine, playable whenever I want, decades later and with or without an Internet connection and regardless if my critical comments offend a developer's message board operator.

That all said, when it comes to streaming, there are so many infrastructure obstacles yet to overcome before streaming can be viable for all the masses of casual gamers AAA developers adore, and it's hard for me to believe that all those obstacles will be overcome in just the next few years.

I thought after everyone agreed that horse armor was pos that should never have existed we won't see such scam again. But we see it daily and we're swimming in the sewerage today.

Then I thought diamonds, gems, whatever used to fraud people in phonegames will be clear "don't" after seeing it in one game. How stupid I was, at least back then proper games like Chaos Rings 2 without microscams existed.

And I thought so many things.
But I'm not working for EA. I'm not making plans on how to take a thirsty man over water without letting him touch it. I'm not devising frauds and schemes on how to sell bullshit for prices as if it was pure gold.

Meanwhile Peter Moore thinks streaming. I can't believe anyone could be that stupid to accept being controlled by someone's streaming and I think…
Sadly, Peter Moore is right. He is right because his audience is sheep and as long as there is sheep, there won't be lack of wool.
Mr. Moore, you're hero of modern capitalism, I bow down!

@Couch
10-15 years?
VR will blossom in just a couple of years as we got necessary GPU boost and competition will significantly drop the helmets price. It won't kill current games design, keep in mind that inferior hardware still can't compete with PC on the VR matter. But we'll be talking about it on this very forum and many of us will play some of it. Just like some of us talk about badly aged RPGmaker games and some don't care for that stuff.

joxer said:

@Couch
10-15 years?
VR will blossom in just a couple of years as we got necessary GPU boost and competition will significantly drop the helmets price. It won't kill current games design, but we'll be talking about it and many of us will play some of it.

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Well consumers have to first accept the technology, and purchase the hardware. I was reading a few interviews that stated 7-10 years for VR to become mainstream.

At most maybe 10-15 percent of gamers will own a VR device in the next few years given current stats. Remember that's just a rough estimate and not counting non-gamers.

As for me it will take a good RPG with decent VR graphics before I buy one. Anyway the the early games being offered right now do not interest me in the slightest.

This claim is laughable for anyone with even the barest sense of the industry. It beggars belief that Moore would suggest this is coming anytime soon.

The infrastructure difficulties for streaming are significant enough in the urban United States, but this "evolution" would totally cut out much of the market in the rural US, Central and South America, Eastern Europe, urban Africa, parts of Southeast Asia, and even Australia. Good luck with that.

Couchpotato said:

Well consumers have to first accept the technology, and purchase the hardware. I was reading a few interviews that stated 7-10 years for VR to become mainstream.

At most maybe 10-15 percent of gamers will own a VR device in the next few years given current stats. Remember that's just a rough estimate and not counting non-gamers.

As for me it will take a good RPG with decent VR graphics before I buy one. Anyway the the early games being offered right now do not interest me in the slightest.

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IMO it will never become mainstream.
It causes health problems if overused - as such noone can buy their 5 year old kid that thing to keep them on a leash like they did with modern mainstream hardware I usually mark as inferior.

Btw I plan to have a helmet in a year or two. Any will do except ones that belong to social networks.
But you know me. I don't play only RPGs so I won't be picky much at the beginning. Means more material to rage over bugs and boredom.

These predictions aren't in our immediate future, and probably not in my lifetime.

They'd need to substantially improve nation-wide, low-cost availability of unlimited low latency, high bandwidth internet to make the prediction about streaming games ever come true. I can't even browse the web and stream a movie at the same time, let alone stream a game from a remote server to my home fast enough to run it as it is streaming.

Also - Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony make their money from having their own propriety console delivery systems, and the associated licensing and/or for the games that run on them. It would take a platform war with a single winner to result in a single internet streaming or chip-based delivery system for games.

But lets say it is a television interface that a tiny device (the console) plugs into. Even if everyone could agree on a standard for a television interface that accepts flash-sized gaming devices, I don't think the technology to pack a console or PC into something as small as a flash-sized device or a chip on an affordable, wide scale basis is in our immediate future.

Virtual technology? Maybe, if it catches fire - but right now it seems to be more of a somewhat pricey niche. It would needs a "killer app" to make it really explode.

Saw EA in the title and that was enough to know it isn't worth reading.

This could be written by anyone into gaming or the press. Mobile taking over, consoles not what they once were (as flexible as computers!) and VR being the next big thing.

Just take out flexibility of consoles and the failure of VR (again) and he might have something.

Every 5 years the computer industry changes itself in a way no one expects is the well trod saying. A real prediction would be guessing it or making it happen as Apple or IBM/Intel did with their planned obsolescence strategy of doubling chip sizes every 18 months.

edit: hmm, thinking about the Sci Fi discussion in the TV Series thread, I think it would be interesting to expound on these predictions of the future as we find out they are wrong!

Regarding streaming: uhh, no, not that fast. If gigabit speeds were spreading fast then that would be true but they ain't so it ain't.

Regarding whether I *want* streaming, I'm wishy-washy. There's some big minuses (no mods being the biggest) but there are some big plusses, too. The economics for it look really good. If I don't like a game, I'll only pay for the time I played. Best of all, though, it should rip the guts out of the pirates so that EVERYBODY is paying. Even if the corporations take the lion's share of those extra profits, it still means much cheaper games for me. You have to have a very fast internet to make it work, though, and that's turning out to be much harder than it should be.

Regarding mobiles… yeah, that's fine. Those games are so far from PC gaming that I have trouble even thinking of them as competition.

E-sports… whatever.

VR: uhh, the industry IS taking off. But I guess he means when it will "really" take off, meaning when EA starts to work with it. Or maybe when it "really really" takes off and nearly half of US households have a VR headset. Or maybe when it "really really really" takes off and the headsets have largely replaced televisions?

Electronic Arse, making stupid predictions for 25 years. Yeah yeah. I head this time and again. Save your data in the cloud, they said, what can go wrong they said. You don't need hardware. Oh yeah? I live in the fucking Reichshauptstadt Berlin and still I get only stupid DSL 3000. When I download a game, my computer is on 2 days. Berlin tried to build an airport, and year after year they say "oh not this year, maybe next year", because such things are apparently too complex for humanity to manage. Technic-Land Germany… my ass.

And without offence, I doubt US with its decaying infrastructure works much better, having electricity hanging on open cables like in the days of Edison, and when a bit of a wind blows, the entire town is dark.

No. Just no. Give me my offline game, my powerhouse computer which is RELIABLE, where I KNOW what I have I have and I have as MINE on MY computer. Period. Paragraph. And not some godsdamned "you dont actually own the game you just rent it, so pay on and no you are not allower to resell, because you dont own shit". I vividly, passionately hate that very idea.

Sell me the game like you sell me socks or a book. It's mine and then I do with it whatever the fuck I want and not nosey EA has the power to off-switch me from a game I already paid because I admitted I vote Trump and EA doesn't like him or what. I want games to have on my computer, for the same reason I dont want money to be replaced by plastic cards: once you lose the real thing, someone else is 100% in control what you can do. So, no thanks.

I still feel that VR doesn't bring enough to the table for it to become mainstream. Maybe in 5 to 10 year VR hardware will progress enough for it to become one. Also games that I like doesn't really benefit from VR technology fast paced FPS, turn-based RPG/strategy.

In a few years I'm out of gaming anyway, I think, playing only retro stuff, then.

I agree, however, that streaming might be a thing - through Steam it is so almost now, but I also agree that it would create a second- or even third-class society in terms of gaming.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

In a few years I'm out of gaming anyway, I think, playing only retro stuff, then.

I agree, however, that streaming might be a thing - through Steam it is so almost now, but I also agree that it would create a second- or even third-class society in terms of gaming.

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That's why it won't go anywhere for awhile. We're still in the era of the PS4/XB1 backlash due to disc distribution. Combined with perceptions, real or not, about latency, the lack of near universal access to true broadband (US FCC now defines as 25Mbps I believe) limits the market. While Netflix and other streaming systems have a lot of scale, they're not ubiquitous yet and I really don't think their market and the gaming market is the same. And don't forget that there's strong pressure afoot in the entrenched ISPs like Comcast and Charter to cap data usage, Comcast sticking with 300Gb per month for now.

I really wonder how these companies do their market analysis. A fair number of communities actually *in* Silicon Valley have speeds topping out at 6Mbps. The US is a horrible patchwork mess.

So I'd guess at a longer time horizon depending on how fast rollouts of 25+ speeds go

This is the opinion of a software vendor. Hardware vendors will still want to sell us devices; that's why we're more likely to see multimedia redirection as the streaming solution. I.e. the stream is decoded and rendered by the client. Rendering everybody from the server end would require huge server farms, and would be a big financial risk. But maybe companies like EA plan to outsource that part to streaming media providers?

Sure streaming games in 1080p is kinda doable with a 100mbit connection.
But sub 4k will soon be a deal breaker and not to mention japan plans to have 8k as mainstream TV for their 2020 olympics.
Streamed games have been tried already and while it worked, OnLive was closed down! Shows how the connection quality is for people...

Oh and fuck EA!

six said:

Oh and fuck EA!

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