Ubisoft Thinks Streaming Will Be Easier Than Buying A Console, One Day

When it comes to adopting and supporting new technologies, Ubisoft is among the publishers which are always in pole position, and it looks like streaming won’t be an exception to that modus operandi.

When it comes to adopting and supporting new technologies, Ubisoft is among the publishers which are always in pole position, and it looks like streaming won’t be an exception to that modus operandi.

In an interview with IGN at Gamescom 2018, CEO Yves Guillemot has confirmed what he said at E3, that streaming is going to be the direction where video games are going to move at some point.

“Technology is actually going in that direction. The machines will be more powerful and the system to transfer data will be more efficient, so at one point, we will have a better experience streaming something than having to buy a machine and change the machine regularly,” he said.

In Guillemot’s vision, players will have the opportunity to adopt different models based on their needs and will, even though it’s not clear at this stage what he means. Sure those models will have different prices, but will it be only a matter of how many games you’ll be able to stream or what?

“We’ll have different models. Everyone will be able to choose the model that fits for the type of amount he or she wants to invest. What I’d like is the diversity of models. I don’t like one specific way to participate. I’d like to keep different types of approaches so that anyone can play with each other.”

In this vision, partnerships like the one with Hitrecord for the creation of content in Beyond Good & Evil 2’s open world are going to be a standard, as those worlds will get bigger and bigger.

“We feel it’s very important to bring the community into the creation of the game so they really feel more at home when they play. Going to HitRecord was a way to organize those things in such a way that it could work with many people. It’s working very well. We are seeing lots of proposals that are fantastic. It’s really going to improve the diversity and appeal of the game,” he told IGN.

“[In the future], games are going to be really huge worlds. It will be really good to have more creators being able to create environments that will be completely different from what only a team [of developers], even if it’s 500 people, can imagine.”

There are still things to be cleared about the technology and the way people will be adopting it (like, you still need a machine to go for a streaming, for example, and that with time will become obsolete and you’ll still be required to get a new one, etc.), without mentioning the issues with latency that the video games industry will need to fix before jumping in this business.

According to rumors, Microsoft already has a next-gen family of consoles in the making, with one of those consoles splitting resources between a physical unit and the cloud for streaming with a very reduced amount of latency. Could this be the solution?