Interesting thing, I had this similar discussion with my friend over the weekend and here's what we came down to.
We think that with advancement of mobile technology it has a chance to phase out the immobile standalone units. Why? well, lets say you have an iphone. You got all your needs covered there, it can browse the web, check email, place calls, it even has Skype, so you can make video calls over wireless rather than using regular data plan for internet. So, since you got such nicely packaged tech in the palm of your hand, why wouldn't you want to have it also serve as a console? say, you come to your friend's house and you want to show him the latest installment of the game you got. Well, you downloaded it to your phone from steam, so you got it with you, all you need to do is wirelessly connect to your friend's HDtv and you're in business.
there are a few problems with that nowadays:
- battery life: iphones and such simply don't have the power to support high levell performance chips that would be required to play the games at the same level as a console. now a way to deal with that would be just plug your iphone in, and let it work from an outlet when it needs to do all that performance calcs needed for gaming. seems like a decent idea but then, you taking away that awesome portability the iphone had, so what would be a better way to about it? wireless charging mode! we all have seen those special pads by duracell and such where you just have to put your mobile device on top of it and it will charge, awesome right? just expand that technology so it can have a little adapter on the wall in the ac jack and you can be standing within 10-20 feet with your iphone to get the full power of the outlet and still maintain the awesome portability of iphone.
- controller: iphone only gets a few side buttons and on-screen keys, far from what we came to expect from a wireless xbox controller. BUT since it's a wireless controller, why not have an option of connecting your xbox controller instead of xbox to your iphone? so you basically only providing HDtv + controller and your iphone does all the work.
- size: and I think this is the biggest problem of all: we all know in order for the iphone to be as slim as it is today, it had to use those extra small and battery efficient cpus,memory modules, etc etc. point is if iphones ever come close to standalone consoles the chips will have to match the size you can put into a console. and currently, there's a huge difference.
so that was my friend's 2 cents that he had to offer up and the problems and possible solutions I've found with that argument, but, as someone had already mentioned in this thread - there seem to be a new service emerging that lets people run latest games on crappy PCs over the internet. Wait a moment, but if you only need a high speed internet and a crappy pc to do it, why can't you do it on your iphone then?
I think, the combination of this "run game remotely" service and iphone is the possible future for the gaming world.
---- here I'll go off topic a bit so if you think that is a worthy discussion maybe we should make a separate thread for this ------
Also, one thing that i noticed some folks don't like about Steam - no physical media of the game that you own. Yeah sure it's great and awesome to have steam store all your games and you just have to log in and download whatever you want to play. But at the same time, you have people that love those collector editions, with those extra little figurines of main characters or special art books or extra dvds on game's development, etc etc. Basically people that love their gaming to the point that they wish to collect their gaming experience and have a physical copy of it.
Another thing, PC gaming has seen a lot of pirating, consequently, PC game publishers have come up with ridiculous array of various DRM options to keep the profits rolling in. Steam was part of this too, but now, once you own a PC game, you can't sell it so easily to another person. Sadly. However, consoles still retain this option, if you bought your own copy of the new game, there's no DRM preventing you from selling that DVD to someone else 5 years from now.
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So coming back to future of gaming, the main feature that consoles have over iphone currently - CD/DVD/BD-rom over iphones well nothingness. So, basically, unless the industry moves away completely from physical game media, mobile gaming will be problematic.
Cheers folks, hope everyone had a good memorial day!