A lot of people expect traditional console gaming to eventually come to an end – an idea that I frankly find absurd, given the move from the discrete generations model to the continuous iterative hardware platform model that gaming consoles seem to be making – but major industry analysts, such as Michael Pachter, have repeatedly stated that microconsole gaming, streaming, PCs, and smartphones will eventually overtake the value proposition that gaming consoles can provide.
However, Ubisoft, at least, doesn’t seem to think that such a major paradigm shift is coming anytime soon. In their recent earnings call with their investors, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot explained that the company fully expects at least one more traditional console cycle before the move to ‘new kinds of gaming consoles.’ When asked for clarification, he did specify that he was not referring to the rumored PS4K and Xbox 1.5 with that statement, either.
“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.”
Personally, I think that with the move to iterative consoles, console gaming may have forestalled its death at the hands of other gaming avenues by at least half a decade, if not more- which means consoles may stick around for far longer than anyone may have expected them to.