Commenting on the future of consoles during the Ubisoft earnings call, CEO Yves Guillemot said that he expects another console generation before “new types of consoles” arrive:
Now on the console side, we expect there will be new consoles that are going to make this market continue to grow and we feel it’s… we’ll still have another generation of consoles before we have new types of consoles coming to the market.
Guillemot added that Ubisoft believes in streaming and they think it’s going to grow, but since it demands a lot of bandwidth “it will still take a bit of time to be more popular.”
When asked about the potential of mid-generation console upgrades such as the PS4.5, Guillemot made it clear they think there’s another console generation coming before they go to streaming:
For the new consoles, there’s nothing official on that so my expectation is we will have another cycle of consoles before we go to streaming. I don’t have dates or anything but what I see is the manufacturers would prefer to have again a new hardware to take up the potential of new possibilities that they can bring.
Because the last console generation transition was very smooth and adopted quickly by consumers, Ubisoft doesn’t see “transition now as a potential problem; we see that as more of a way to boost the market.”
Guillemot’s comments are similar to ones made by EA’s Peter Moore earlier this week. “I’m not sure there will be consoles, as we know them anymore,” he said. “Games will be accessed by streaming technology, so we don’t need hardware intermediaries in between the two.”
[Source: GameSpot]
