Evolution of the Console

How, exactly, do you see the console changing? You mentioned that it’s going to have to move, to some extent, to the cloud. How do you envisage that console in five or seven years’ time?

I think the first thing is that the console is an interface, with the consumer, for delivering a user experience. If you start with what happens at the beginning of that user experience, a lot of that is already not defined by the console. It’s defined by a combination of system software and activity that happens in the cloud. In the case of PlayStation 4 and the current Xbox generations, the consoles are already hybrid devices. Certainly, in relation to user experience, when you think about messaging, communication, viewership, where people are seeing other people’s gameplay, those are already connected experiences. They are also fed through networks. That’s going to continue and I think you will get to a point, also, where gameplay, game assistance, help, is partly done in the cloud and partly on the machine. Actually, that happens already and will happen in the coming generations, more and more.

There are parts of gameplay which are best done locally and parts which can be done elsewhere. Those are problems that we will begin to see emerge. It’s also worth bearing in mind that, when we think about streaming, most people that stream games at the moment, do so on a console. It’s another way of accessing a game, but most of the people that want to access a game of that type, will have some kind of console, whether it’s an Xbox or a PlayStation, or something else.

How do you think that will change as we get more cross-play? Do you think that console is quite sticky with the consumer?

Streaming lends itself really well to two trends, which are quite dominant at the moment. It lends itself really well to cross-play, because it’s very easy for a customer to jump from their mobile, to their PC, to their console and not feel tied to one device. It also lends itself well to subscription. The reason for that is that subscription models, typically, offer a large variety of games and the value proposition is about trying as many games as you want, until you find something that fits and meets your needs – we don’t have trailers, but we have the ability to play – and then diving in. Of course, that’s not really easy to do if your process of trial is downloading 50gb or 100gb games every time. It’s not really a Netflix type experience.

Streaming lends itself really well to those two use cases. Particularly for mobile, it addresses challenges of the device. Mobile gaming is a really big part of the industry now and, despite its limitations, it’s very popular. Its limitations are that the processing power of phones is still weak, compared to the higher-end consoles but, more importantly, the battery life of a mobile phone, if you’re playing a game, is really very poor. That isn’t improving because, as screens get better and processors get better, they just drain more of the battery and games is probably the worst thing that you can do. Many, many times more power is used playing a game than it is watching a video.

Streaming addresses both of those, quite nicely. Once the problems of bad network performance are overcome, I think we will see the ability to have almost any game, on a mobile, subject to the I/O port issues, which are also being addressed. Streaming will help there and, I think the thing to bear in mind is that it is not necessarily a binary choice. Just because you stream a game, to your mobile, which you can currently do, through remote play technologies, which the platforms have deployed, that doesn’t mean, on another platform you might not download. What we’ll see, I think, is a hybrid of these two use cases, depending on the type of customer you are and how bothered you are. It’s worth remembering that one of the biggest trends in gaming, at the moment, is competitive gaming. For those consumers, they are worried about whether their controller is working fast enough and their life is in many, many milliseconds of differentiation. They’re going to want to play locally, for a lot of their experiences, anyway.

I think it’s going to depend on the consumer and the type of games you’re playing. To play cross-play doesn’t always mean you have to cross-play as a stream. I think it’s going to be a very plural world, for the next decade.