As reported by GameSpot , during this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, March 19, the Chief Product Officer of the videogame market research firm EEDAR, Geoffrey Zatkin, made a claim during a panel that the eighth generation of gaming consoles–the Xbox One, the PlayStation 4, the Wii U–“ could be the last generation of dedicated hardware.”
During the panel, titled “Awesome Video Game Data”, Zatkin didn’t say what might come next if a ninth generation doesn’t come around. With the rising popularity of The Cloud and Cloud-powered services, it’s this author’s opinion that it’s understandable why Zatkin would make such a claim.
Sony’s PlayStation Now is a good example to support Zatkin’s claim. The service will allow for PlayStation 4 players to stream games straight to their console from The Cloud, which currently requires a 5Mb/s internet connection at this point in time. When it was announced, it knocked GameStop’s shares .