Jamin makes some interesting predictions about the future of gaming I wanted to share. He seems to think that at some point the idea of watching and playing video games will cross together more to create a kind of game/spectator hybrid experience. He cites Twitch Plays Pokemon as a recent example.

He makes a few other interesting predictions too. What do you think, where will gaming be in five to ten years?

scrypt   Supporter wrote on 05/15/2014 at 01:47pm

This is totally late, but I just thought of something that sounded more interesting than the 5 or 6 other things I was going to predict. I think that, within the next 10 years, someone (or a consortium of ones, a Gaming UN, if you will, with the ironic acronym of G.U.N.) will offer a free-to-play hardware (i.e. console) option. Then, we will finally have a single console system environment. Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo... hell, anyone that wanted to contribute, could invest a fraction of their R&D and production costs into building a universal hardware environment. All of the games would either go free-to-play or subscription based. Master Chief, Mario, and Nathan Drake could live in relative harmony. The Big Three could still make money off of peripherals (all conformed to universal standards, like USB) and in-house games and services (they could still host XBox Live, PSN/PS+, etc, and charge their normal (or increased) subscriptions).

The way I see it, at this point in time, all of the console hardware seems to be normalizing, and to the point where they are indistinguishable from a good gaming PC. They are spending all this time and money just to develop a compact gaming rig that won't burn your house down after it's been in use for 8 hours straight. Console life cycles are getting longer, too. Investing in a 10-year solution seems like it would be a win/win for everyone. A standard gaming console. A SteamBox, really, but one that everything could play on.

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