Q: Next generation consoles are coming soon. There’s a lot we still don’t know about them, but we do know that both the Xbox Scarlett and the PlayStation 5 are changing the ways games load with the inclusion of SSD drives. How is this going to improve RPGs in your opinion?
A: To be fair, people have SSDs in their PCs already, so it’s not that much of a revolution. Streaming is a very important technology for modern games, so the faster you can stream your data, you can put more of it, and you’re going to have higher quality assets, which is pretty much what everybody expects there to be. The big questions are going to be how much memory do you get to actually do that? Is there sufficient memory to fool around with? How much CPU power are we getting? Because that’s also important, but it’s the classic things that we see with every generation. I mean, how much GPU power do we get? But at the end of the day, it’s always going to be more, it’s going to be more detailed, it’s going to allow us to do more accurate simulations.
I think that the more interesting question is how stuff like Google Stadia will change things. It gives developers something different. In the data center, these machines are connected to each other, and so you could start thinking of doing things like elastic rendering, like make a couple of servers together, to do physics simulations that may not be possible on current local hardware. I think you’ll see a lot of evolution in this direction.
Q: Subscription services are becoming big. Microsoft has the Xbox Game Pass, EA has Origin/EA Access and now Ubisoft announced their uPlay Plus. Do you think this model could help smaller games to emerge?
A: When talking about subscription services, somebody reminded me of the scene in Star Wars where the Palpatine is about to rise to become the Emperor and then he says that this is how democracy ends. So I’m not really sure that subscription services are a good thing for the developers. They are good for players, as they initially give a wide range of games. But the problem is the same one many have with Netflix: for example, I started watching like a million series, but I don’t see any to the end anymore. And if this is going to be the case for games as well, I don’t think that it will be a good thing. The only ones that benefit from subscription services are the really the big blockbuster. So I’m not really sure if the small ones are going to be able to break through on the subscription services, because we will be super dependent on the provider of the subscription service and what he puts on the front page, so I don’t think it’s a good idea at all that power is given to only a few key players.
Q: In this regard, maybe the Epic Games Store may help. I have seen a couple of titles on there that have been marketed well.
A: It’s a marketplace. There are lots of stores and this has always been the case, even in retail. So you can talk to certain stores to put your game in a more prominent position, it’s a free market with where marketing matters to make things visual. And so having more stores is a good thing, provided that the conditions at which you can sell it on them are fair to everyone.
So I think that if there are more stores there is a higher chance that more people can break through as there are different propositions on different stores and this kind of differentiation is not necessarily bad, because it’s like stores on the street where you go to a specialized shop. This is the biggest difference with subscription services, as the revenue that you get is based on the time the game gets played. If you make a game that last two hours and only a small part of it gets played, you don’t get anything in terms of revenue.
], hope for streaming platform and skepticism towards subscriptions) on the industry are more interesting.
