14 DAY TRIAL // Final Fantasy XIII might have made news when Microsoft announced that the long running series would no longer be a PlayStation exclusive and would also appear on the Xbox 360 but there's a good chance that when Final Fantasy XV comes around, in five or six years, the game will be playable not just on home gaming consoles but on a wide variety of devices connected to the net.
Yoichi Wada, who is the president of Square Enix, told the Develop magazine that “Let's say in ten years time what we traditionally call 'console games' simply won't exist. In the past the platform was hardware, but that switched to the network. So a time will come when the hardware isn't even needed any more.”
The biggest potential to change the current idea of console generations coming out every few years is generated by the prospect of offering titles directly through the network, working on any hardware they might own as long as it is connected to the Internet.
Wada says that the biggest strength of the Microsoft gaming console is actually Xbox Live, which has a clear path to integration with its PC cousin, Games for Windows Live. The PlayStation Network is not as popular but offers much of the same services, with only the Wii lacking, at the moment, a solid framework for connected gaming.
The president of Square Enix believes that the potential for growth residing in the area of browser games is enormous and that all publishers and developers need to consider it and prepare projects, which will take advantage of it. The big challenge will be to manage the expectations of the hardcore fans of series like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest with the need to make future browser-based experiences accessible to as many potential gamers as possible.