14 DAY TRIAL // While Sony thinks that the physical distribution of software, like DVDs and Blu-rays or boxed games, isn't going anywhere in the near future, Square Enix sees not just the opposite, but the very apocalypse of things with shape and form. Yoichi Wada, the chief of Square Enix, predicts that not only will physical media disappear, but consoles and platforms altogether are a dying breed. In an exclusive interview with MCV that will be out sometime next week, Wada said that he expected this drastic change to take place sometime in the next decade.
“In ten years’ time a lot of what we call ‘console games’ won’t exist,” he said. “All the distributors and sales firms will suffer a big negative impact” in this world that Wada envisions, where home hardware will become less and less used to host software, and the applications will move solely to online servers, digital distribution and game streaming. He said that he was not the only one that saw this future, as Sony and Microsoft were already prepared for the upcoming change. If you can't really see where this is coming from, then just blame it on Japanese media, and write it off as Serial Experiments Lain or Ghost in the Shell indoctrination.
Still, it's not like signs of this upcoming chance can't already be seen and Wada is most likely right. Digital distribution is becoming more and more popular, and Sony even started introducing games that made installing them on the console an optional process. “Somewhere around 2005 the console manufacturers’ strategy shifted,” Wada added. “In the past the platform was hardware, but it has switched to the network. A time will come when the hardware isn’t even needed anymore. Social and browser games are going to grow dramatically – especially in areas like Asia which does not have as big a console market.”
“With that, any kind of terminal becomes a potential platform on which games can be played – that’s exponential growth in the potential of gaming. The potential size of the market is enormous,” he added. He also stated that Square Enix was also getting ready for this paradigm shift, and the studio was investing more and more into social and browser games and keeping a very close eye on the evolution of its upcoming MMO, Final Fantasy XIV.