Met de leaks over een all digital Xbox Series X en Sony’s recente aankondiging van een PlayStation 5 Slim met los te koppelen disk drive, vrezen veel gamers over een toekomst waar fysieke games niet meer bestaan.
Ubisoft topman Chris Early heeft onlangs een interview afgegeven die onder andere ging om dit onderwerp. Volgens Early zal het aantal verkopen van fysieke games in de komende jaren afnemen, maar hij verwacht niet dat fysieke games gaan verdwijnen. Early noemt als voorbeeld dat veel mensen het verzamelen van fysieke doosjes, special editions, Collector’s editions en het geven van games als cadeautjes, heel belangrijk vinden.
“There’s a collector edition market,” Ubisoft’s SVP, strategic partnerships and business development. There’s the aspect of gifting physical items and allowing access for people to be able to easily purchase a game in a store and gift them to their friends or family. Some people will always want to own the physical disc. I just don’t think it’s going away. Do I think physical sales might get lower over time? Sure, but will it ever completely go away? I don’t think so.”
De topman gaf ook aan dat hij verwacht dat game streaming via de Cloud de komende 15 jaar flink gaat groeien:
“Our underlying goal in the cloud gaming market is to really broaden access to our games to more players. I have a choice of platforms available in my home, and I still stream because I don’t want to install something until I’m sure I’m going to play it. With streaming, I can try a game out without waiting for a download and then decide I want to play something else, which I don’t then have to wait to download, too. The HD games that are being made continue to evolve and become more complex, so the ability to stream that to a variety of devices just from a browser window or on an existing piece of hardware really opens up the market for more people to be able to access and play our games, whatever their situation.”
“We believe that streaming will continue to grow over time. If you look back to 15 years ago, when there were companies trying to create streaming platforms, it was a much more challenging time, and the infrastructure wasn’t quite there. But if you look at what’s available to people in their homes today, the speed of internet access is significantly better than it was 10-15 years ago. Over the next 10-15 years, I think the same thing is going to happen and it’s going to continue to get better. And as it continues to evolve, the more that underlying technology advances, the easier streaming is going to be. I buy music still, but I don’t have to think about buying a CD or hardware to play it on, or remembering to bring it with me when I leave the house, because my music is available to me all the time. And if I’m in a place without a connection, I’ve been able to download the songs that I want and listen to them offline. I think the same thing will exist in gaming as we go forward. We’re already seeing a significant increase in the digital share of purchases, and people trust that their game’s going to be available to them without absolutely requiring physical media to play it.”
