Is Console Gaming On Its Way Out?
“I’ll go on the record and say that the next generation of hardware will be the last consoles. And they should be.
"I’m going to go out on a limb, because why the fuck not? I don’t care if I’m wrong, I’m not a business guy. I think next-gen consoles are going to do 40 percent of [the sales volume] of the current gen hardware. The asteroid has hit the Earth, the dust cloud is covering the sun and the dinosaurs are on the way out - but not the games! We’ll always have great games and bleeding edge graphics… it’s just going to be a new delivery mechanism.”
David Jaffe in an interview with Games Industry.
It’d be an interesting evolution – a change one shouldn’t expect without kicking and screaming. Whichever usurping medium of gaming is introduced, it’ll have to conquer an untold barrier of accessibility before being openly adopted. That and its games have to have the potential of complicity. Smartphone gaming, a financial influx turning industry heads, won’t be enough to kill the console until the scope and nature of its games can rival experiences found on those machines.
Whatever’s next will probably harness the strengths of both, but that won’t be enough on its own. See, gamers have a tendency to simply go where the games are, and so long as this next evolution can meet that demand, the battle is half over. But would you be willing to see consoles made obsolete?