PixlBit

re: the glut of console related rumours and nonsense

IGN IGN IGN :(

 

I hope IGN isn't becoming the tabloid of video game journalism.  Over the past few weeks I've come across a series of pretty wild and speculative rumours on IGN's newsfeeds about new and/or the end of consoles.  Some came from some pretty far out souces, like the cloud gaming service, Gaikai.  IGN was pretty quick to point out that it was a sketcky prediction to make that either Microsoft or Sony would soon have to quit the console race.  Gaikai (and IGN) is probably puking up rumours in a giant wind storm, hoping it lands in some one's lap.  The fledgling cloud services like Gaikai, or Onlive have business models that are pretty much banking on the decline or the end of consoles. 

There are those that believe we could be at the end of the last generation for gaming consoles.  Cloud computing could be set to take over the world once net neutrality is adopted and internet throttling and traffic shaping is banned by an efficient, progressive, non-filibustery US congress, which would have to take the lead on such a thing.  If.  If.  If.

We just barely managed to get SOPA canned from passing to the next level of that funky American system, can we expect an internet utopia so soon?  Well, maybe not barely, that bill was a mess to begin with and would've made bad law with or without the massive social-networking backlash, in my opinion.  But even if cloud computing is the future, the future is not now.  We are likely to see at least one more generation of game consoles, and here's why I think so.

Betamax!!!

  Mr. Tsuchiya

Mr. Tsuchiya is one of my business students studying English at my current school.  (That is not a photo of him pictured above!)  He's an engineer for Sony working out of a factory in Tagajo-city near Sendai, Miyagi.  Those city names may or may not be familiar to some.  They are the same areas devastated by the quake and tsunami of 3/11/11.  As a matter of fact, the Tagajo factory was located just a block away from the kindergarten that I was working at during that time.  Actually I wasn't at the kindergarten that day, it was only a part-time job on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the quake happened on a Friday.  Apparently after the school received the tsunami warning, all the kids and staff evacuated to the Sony factory, up to some of the higher level floors.  It was Mr. Tsuchiya that finally informed me about they safey of the kids after the tsunami - information I was looking for some nine months after the disaster.  It's one of the reasons he has warmed up to me a little more recently, a shared common experience, as well as regular weekly lessons with a half-decent teacher and Sony-fanboy!

I use the word engineer loosely.  Mr. Tsuchiya is now in a management position, which he doesn't like, overseeing a Sony R&D department tasked with creating the next generation of optical data disks.  This is the group in charge of creating whatever comes next after Blu-ray.  It could be the very format that PS4 might be using when it finally comes out, not that I'm barfing up rumours and conjecture or anything.

I actually asked Mr. Tsuchiya what the name of the product will be, and exactly what kind of tech it will be using, but I didn't get much of an answer because it's rather top-secret info.  He did say it would be an optical laserdisk, and would be about the same leap in data capacity as BluRay was from DVDs. 

Then we went on to have a rather interesting conversation about cloud computing.  He believes that in five years we will be technologically capable of switching over fully to cloud computing and non-physical means of data processing and storage.  But whether or not the world will have the infrastructure available for it, or if the political will needed for it to happen will be sufficient is where our conversations get hung up each week.  We both don't have an answer for it, and it's not something that anyone can prognosticate.

 

  Mr. Mogami

Mr. Mogami is another business student of mine.  He's an engineer, a real engineer, and not stuck in administrative hell.  He's also from the Tagajo factory, though, oddly enough, Mr. Mogami and Mr. Tsuchiya have never met.  Sony is a rather big company.  They work in different departments at the factory and take lessons at my school at different times.  Mr. Mogami is in a similar R&D field, developing the next generation of memory and data storage devices but with new technologies involving magnetic tape!  (I think I need a betamax pic again!)

I was quite surprised to learn that anyone was still researching such seemingly antiquated technology.  But Mr. Mogami says that magnetic tape storage is still the cheapest format available and that in the future we could expect to see new versions of magnetic tape based storage media.  Whether they come in the form of cassettes or something is where Mr. Mogami had to stop me.  Again, top secret stuff.  He's pretty convinced that the technology will be coming back and playing an important role in video and sound recording as well as non-optical data storage.  Based on his endless speeches about his R&D projects, and his blistering enthusiasim about it, he could make anyone think we're more likely to see a Betamax 2 on the market before Playstation 4!

As for cloud computing, we also had an epic chat session about the subject.  We never really got into the political or infrastructure issues with creating a stable internet, but the sheer economics of a company like Sony, that mass manufactures high-tech products to sell to individuals - and then switching it's product range to a more hardware based, cloud computing super-server that would make typical products from companies like Sony, Panasonic and Samsung nearly obsolete.

Mr. Mogami doesn't think Sony, or similar companies, will stop developing and making new BluRays or DVDs or consoles or laptops or cell phones or anything else any time in the future.  Because that's what they do!  They make stuff!  So he would very much disagree with Mr. Tsuchiya's 5 year timeline.  But that may be because Mr. Mogami is still dealing with magnetic tape technology, which is something I still can't wrap my head around.

But they both work for Sony, in the same R&D factory, just different project departments.  They both can't be flat wrong, or 100% perfect product prognosticators.  So maybe we should just split the predicitions down the middle.

I hope one of my next students is in the Playstation R&D section, so I can milk him/her for information and spoil the media's puke party with some accurate info.  But I think it's safe to say there will be at least one more console generation and that cloud computing is for people with their heads in the clouds, at least for now.