Current London Venture Partners member Phil Harrison has doubled down on digital since leaving SCE Worldwide. He’s currently on the advisory board for Gaikai and thinks that’s a reflection of the future.
“There is undoubtedly a generation of kids alive on the planet today who will never purchase a physical media package for any of their digital entertainment,” he stated. “The console companies, if they wanted to take true market leadership, could do it in the next generation. There s no reason why Microsoft and Sony, in particular, couldn t push that change for the next iteration of their major consoles.”
“If you extrapolate the market-share gains that [Apple] are making, forward for ten years if they carry on unrestrained in their growth, then there s a pretty good chance that Apple will be the games industry,” he said. “The fact that the consumer purchase and discovery mechanism is so well integrated you see something on the App Store, you click a button, the product delivers to your device. That end-to-end shopping experience, if you want to call it that, has been so elegantly built by Apple and they will continue to refine it.”
“I probably buy more through Amazon, in terms of value, than any other retailer throughout the year,” Harrison noted. “I find that the rest of the world meaning Apple, Amazon, Steam are showing the future of how content will be consumed, adding to that NetFlix and LoveFilm and the like, and that console companies run the risk of becoming a little antiquated unless they change their business model.”
“With streaming through the web available now, he thinks the next console war will extend to new categories. First of all a web browser will stop looking like a web browser. It won t necessarily have a URL bar at the top and it won t necessarily have the same user-interface functionality that we know from Chrome or Firefox today,” Harrison explained. “But the idea of a set of pixels that are on a surface and which are updated from a cloud which is basically what a web browser does that is going to become much more the de facto way of interfacing with content, whether entertainment or information.”
“If that console, physical device goes away that s fine but that doesn t mean that PlayStation or Xbox as brands go away. It could be that the game and browser of the future is powered by PlayStation, or powered by Xbox Live or Nintendo,” added Harrison. “I think that that s where you ll see the battleground: not necessarily putting boxes full of chips and hard drives into your living room but giving you a storefront, navigation, discovery, a business model and user-interface.”
Source: Edge {link no longer active}
