Eidos president: "Big games need big broadband"

Eidos life president Ian Livingstone has highlighted poor broadband as a serious hindrance to the expansion of games as an entertainment medium.

In a presentation for the Broadband World Forum 2012, as reported by PC Gamer, Livingstone said the games industry is the "largest entertainment industry in the world", curtrently worth $50 billion and likely to reach $90 billion by 2015, so broadband providers should be backing it now.

“Games are now moving from a product to a service,” he said, pointing to any latency over 40 milliseconds as an issue for this kind of gaming.

“We’re still having to fight bandwidth to avoid latency. Big games need big broadband. It’s kind of crazy that we’re fighting broadband the whole time in our industry. You’re kind of holding us back in many respects. We want to do more.”

Livingstone said gamers are among the most demanding of Internet users and developers are already pushing the boundaries of what current infrastructure allows.

"So, you must plan for what you can’t predict as well as what you can. Super-fast games will drive demand for super-fast broadband, so, ISPs, please do not rest on your laurels," he said.

Watch the full presentation through the link above.