Is on-demand gaming the future?

Valerie | 27 Jul 2009, 08:13

First we had Onlive, the subscription-based games streaming service which was unveiled to much fanfare earlier this year.  Then Gaikai followed suit with a service that enables users to play games that run on a remote server regardless of hardware platform. This week, another contender staked its claim in the race to take cloud computing to the gaming mainstream with the launch of yet another new games on-demand service.

Based on similar technology to Onlive and Gaikai, start-up firm Playcast Media announced a pilot program with Israeli cable network Hot to stream games directly to users’ television sets, promising “PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 quality games on demand” and asserting that it avoids lags and latency - bold claims according to media commentators.

Video games on demand, or gaming over a server connection instead of installing a game on your machine, has become a hot topic for the games industry, not only because it threatens to cut retailers out, but also because it lets gamers play any game on any kind of computer.

Gaikai founder David Perry believes that “freeing games from the narrow pipelines of consoles and high-end PCs that they are currently available through” will be the business model of the future and at the recent Developer conference, he went as far as predicting the death of physical media. “It won’t be long before 100 per cent of games are all online,” he said.

Despite analyst optimism that there is a bright future ahead for the on-demand model, this vision is perhaps just that – an indication of what is to come.

For the next few years at least, the console manufacturers will continue their dominance, with the Nintendo Wii expected to edge ahead of the Sony PS3 and Microsoft Xbox 360 in global sales of consoles by 2015.

The chief executive of social media gaming firm Playfish, Kristian Segerstrale sees the decline of the console happening much sooner. Commenting on EA’s recent entry into the social gaming market he said:

“The challenge is, no matter how social you try to make a console not everybody has one…”

“They (EA) clearly believe, much as we believe, that games are becoming services and that retail distribution for games will decline quite rapidly from here onwards.”

Segerstrale predicts that incompatible, prohibitively expensive games consoles could fail to compete with the more accessible and connected experiences online services can deliver.