It’s the never-ending argument: with the rise of mobile gaming, do consoles really need to exist anymore?
The answer differs depending on the individual you speak to, but long-time industry analyst Michael Pachter recently threw his opinion into the mix during VentureBeat’s GamesBeat 2015 press conference.
“Now let’s fast forward 30 years later… we all have a monitor in our home. We all have a CPU and a GPU. It might be a tablet. It might be a laptop. It’s going to be the iPad Pro. It’ll be the Surface Pro,” said Pachter in an interview with GamesBeat.
“So once we have that, all we’re really missing is the controller and then wait for all that stuff to talk. And the way that stuff will talk is Chromecast. The Apple TV. So it is very easy to replicate the console experience with a CPU and GPU combo that is pretty damned competitive with current generation consoles. We won’t be there with the iPhone 6S, but we’ll be there with the iPhone 9.”
Pachter goes on to discuss the current weaknesses he believes are associated with console gaming. He says many people today purchase video game consoles to play a single title, for example the Call of Duty series. Pachter says that this investment isn’t justified for the average consumer and that this type of experience will not exist in a few years. Instead he suggests the video game industry could evolve into something else.
“The punchline is that consoles don’t need to exist. Those of you in mobile games know that. The current state of mobile games is very much like YouTube, and the console market is like a 100 million dollar Hollywood motion picture. So they’re different types of experiences,” said Pachter
Essentially, Pachter believes that while big console gaming experiences aren’t going anywhere, the way people play them is destined to change drastically, suggesting that in the near future smartphones might become portable home game consoles.
To put Pachter’s statement in perspective, imagine Microsoft’s Windows 10 Continuum feature, but for gaming – this is his vision for the future of video games, although many will likely disagree with the opinion.
[source]Touch Arcade[/source][via]Venture Beat[/via]
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