Integration: Living in the Dark Ages

When you're a gamer that can't get access to high speed internet, it changes things. The biggest thing obviously being that I can't play online, download DLC, access streaming apps or any of those fancy schmancy things being integrated into gaming systems nowadays. So this whole concept of integrating all these new functions into my system don't really affect me at all. Or do they? Even though I can't access any of these extra features, what happens when all those extra features gain more attention than the games for said machine?

Living with out high speed internet is bad enough, but now that so many games are coming out that have game ending bugs in them that require a patch to fix it'd become even worse. You know what happens when I encounter a bug like that? I'M SCREWED. I do from time to time take my systems to a friends house, but thats pretty rare. It's just such a huge pain in the ass to drag them all around town, and then set them back up. It goes without saying that I don't have a Netflix account or premium accounts for any other streaming app like Spotify or Hulu.


(I figured my c-blog should have a picture, so here's Godzilla)

Even though I don't use any of those extra apps on my console, I do fear a future where they take up too much of the lime light, instead of the games I wanna play on my GAME console. I understand why companies would go for this, all the extra features and apps draw in a bigger market that they can sell their product to. I can't really blame them for wanting to do that. It is scary though to think that if things keep following the trends that we've been seeing we could not be seeing many new original games, or even not as many games as we see now. Will we still be seeing games like Okami and Last Guardian in 10 years? It seems doubtful.

Imagine an E3 conference in 10 years where Microsoft is introducing their latest Xbox. “The Xbox 1080 has it all! You can stream every TV channel known to man, listen to your entire music library, shop on amazon and eBay, text it to turn your lights off, and it'll clean your room!! Oh and uh … we have a halo for it … we might release another game this year too … meh.” It's a scary idea, and obviously that example was way over the top. As long as people keep buying games we'll still have games released. I think the real question is though, will we be seeing less games in the future due to so much integration in our systems? Will we still see new series? It's hard to say, we all know how much people like change (they don't).

But maybe things aren't that bad? Look at PCs, they have tons of features and third party apps and some of the most original games to ever be made. Console games do better most of the time than PC games, but most people have a computer. If the PC market can survive why couldn't consoles? Would consoles require some sort of Steam service to be able to stick around? Would it need to be cloud based service? I'm not sure but it'll be interesting to see what all the next consoles do and don't do.

---

LOOK WHO CAME:

crackity jones