During a talk at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas, industry veteran and Shiny Entertainment founder Dave Perry (Earthworm Jim, Messiah) reflected on gaming's past -- and pointed to the future, where he sees single-player experiences taking a distant back seat to online free-to-play games.
Perry began by showing old marketing material from his first computer, the Sinclair ZX81. At the time, said Perry, the overriding mainstream thought was that computers would br solely used for productivity purposes. "I, like everone else, however, used it to make and play video games," he said.
Looking at how technology has progressed this those days, with increasing storage space and read/write speeds, Perry speculated as to how storage will progress in the future: to unlimited storage through virtual media with fast, ubiquitous wi-fi.
Similarly, he continued, processing will become not traditionally single-core or multicore, but rather clouds of processors.
Part of the technology he has been looking into, he explained, is focused on remote storage and processing, even in games, then delivering the final rendered frames to gamers via Flash video -- removing the need for players to themselves own powerful software and hardware. "It's like going back in time to when we had terminals instead of desktops," he summed up.
I hope he is wrong.
