Tag Archives: streaming games service

During GameStop’s quarterly earnings call yesterday, the company revealed it has reduced the scope of its streaming games service, Gamasutra reports. Built on technology acquired from Spawn Labs and Stardock, the cloud-based gaming package will now be restricted to PCs, tablets and IP-capable TVs. The service is still expected to go live this year, and GameStop is apparently in negotiation with a host of content providers.

Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada has said that the games industry must be prepared for the eventual switch to digital distribution and streaming services as consoles games “won’t exist” someday.

“In ten years’ time a lot of what we call ‘console games’ won’t exist,” he told MCV. “Somewhere around 2005 the console manufacturers’ strategy shifted. In the past the platform was hardware, but it has switched to the network. A time will come when the hardware isn’t even needed anymore.

“With that, any kind of terminal becomes a potential platform on which games can be played – that’s exponential growth in the potential of gaming. The potential size of the market is enormous.”

Wada said that Square’s preparing by producing more social and browser games along with monitoring 2010’s Beta of Final Fantasy XIV on PS3, and that in order to survive the switch, third-parties must follow suit or else “suffer a big negative impact”.

“Social and browser games are going to grow dramatically – especially in areas like Asia which does not have as big a console market,” he said.

More through the link.

Like Verizon, AT&T has plans to offer games via a digital download service.

The company’s executive director of gaming, Glenn Broderick, has said that with cloud computing expected to “take off in the next 5-10 years”, AT&T wants to offer the same sort of streaming game service that OnLive is planning.

“The way we look at it is we have between everything almost 100 million customers, and we are evenly distributed demographically, so there will be lots of people who just want to play Bejeweled but there will be others who want to download Call of Duty,”  he told IndustryGamers. “We need to accommodate them all.

“The customization work we’re doing combined with our customer relationships will enable us to put together a service that is relevant to the customer, so that if I’m a mom of two who plays Bejeweled, when I go to the [portal] I’m not going to see an ad for the next Call of Duty or something.

“We’re putting a ton of money into back-end systems for both mobile and the broadband site… We’re making serious investments in the games space because it’s now seen as a huge strategic initiative for AT&T. And before it just wasn’t; it wasn’t on the executive agenda.”

When asked how much the company plans to spend on the service, Broderick said that it was “more than a million and less than a billion.”

Fair enough.

Thanks, BigDownload.