EA Founder Believes Consoles Will Become a Thing of the Past
The Nintendo Switch 2 is coming out and it is projected to be a bestseller. You remember the high demand for the PlayStation 5 that resulted in some people having to wait a year to get their pre-ordered consoles. At this moment, PlayStation is allegedly working on the PlayStation 6 and Microsoft is also working on a new console.
And while the release dates for these new consoles haven’t been revealed, the recent example of the Nintendo Switch 2 shows us that consoles are still in high demand. But not everyone seems to think so.
Former EA CEO and the company’s founder, Trip Hawkins, recently wrote an interesting blog post in which he claims that consoles are a thing of the past and that the future of gaming will take us to a wholly different platform than most gamers are used to.
EA has been a pillar of console and PC gaming for decades, and while the company has been subjected to a lot of criticism recently, it is a fact that EA has shaped the gaming world for the better. Generally.
Trip Hawkins was one of the most important people in the early days of the company, and while he is no longer in charge of EA anymore, he recently published a very interesting text about the future of the gaming industry, alleging that the era of consoles is coming to an end.
And while he made his mind clear, Hawkins actually started his post by praising the Switch 2. “The Switch is much cheaper than an iPhone, and even a parent on a budget can rationalize it as something that will emotionally bond them with their children, who need the status of being able to say they have one on the playground,” he started. “I fully expect Switch 2 to exceed 100 million units sold in its lifetime, just like its predecessor. This will be the 5th Nintendo platform to exceed 100 million (DS, Switch, GameBoy, Wii, Switch 2) and every one of these has been family-oriented. Sony’s PS1, PS2 and PS4 are the only others in history to sell this well.”
But, while he expects the Switch 2 to do well, he also agrees that Sony and Microsoft don’t have a proper alternative in the handheld department, and while the Steam Deck does, the console will probably not become a major bestseller, he thinks.
And this leads to his concluding remarks on the future of gaming. In short, Hawkins believes that the future of gaming is in cloud gaming, as it is much more practical and cheaper than traditional console manufacture, so if that does happen, everyone will be happy, both the companies and the players, as companies will have a hard time convincing consumers to by consoles that are becoming more and more expensive.
“As for the next generation of consoles, we’re now in a glide plane where the cloud is everything and it will be far more convenient to have rack-mounted GPUs in data centers than to try to convince the public to buy more consoles, at higher prices, than they have in the past. We will never see another conventional console sell 150 million units, like the PlayStation 2 did (I still own a few of those!),” he wrote.
“The technical prowess of PCs, current consoles and even the newer smartphones is increasingly comparable and good enough, and even for Sony and Microsoft it will soon make more sense to focus on their game streaming subscription services instead of losing money on hardware manufacturing and marketing. Brands like PlayStation and Xbox can be maintained yet will also be more easily available on PCs and billions of smart devices, for a win-win among the cloud providers, game brands and players,” Hawkins concluded.
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