Cloud Gaming: Will Cable and Phone Providers Make Consoles Obsolete?
By Karla Robinson
September 28, 2012
September 28, 2012
- Even after OnLive’s difficulties, top cable and phone companies are looking to offer cloud gaming directly on televisions, sources say.
- “If successful, Web-based games could accelerate a shift away from consoles, the industry’s main money maker for the past three decades,” reports Bloomberg. NPD notes that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo built a U.S. market worth $24.1 billion in 2011.
- “Consumers are already dumping consoles in favor of games on smartphones and tablets, leading to a 39 percent decline in video-game hardware sales last month from a year earlier,” explains the article.
- AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, Comcast and Cox Communications are all reportedly in talks to deliver video-gaming services. The sources also say that carriers are likely to start testing technologies this year for a rollout as early as next year.
- “It makes perfect sense why they would want to go after this market,” says Mitch Lasky, former executive at Electronic Arts. “Streaming games use a ton of bandwidth and really benefit from good networks. But it’s a gnarly execution problem they’re trying to solve.”
- “Carriers still have to get the technology in place,” the article states. “To stream games from remote servers to multiple devices simultaneously, they need to license virtualization technology. And to make the experience comparable to that of a console, they also must incorporate powerful graphics processors into their data centers, replacing chips used in consoles.”
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