Last Acton Hero

I don't think there's inherently a danger of that, but again, if you are using something because that middleware also sort of reflects your goals, then they're going to converge a little more than they might be expected to otherwise, I think it's the nature of it. You expect those things to be a bit more similar than they might be.

But, I also don't think that it's necessarily true. I think we've seen some developers who've taken a middleware engine and tweaked it in a way that creates a signature that's uniquely their own. So, it happens, but it doesn't have to be like that.

I think that we can look at the state of tech outside the gamespace - maybe look at the PC space, see what people are doing. If we took all the stuff that exists today and compared it against the 360 or PS3, would it represent a massive leap over them? I think in some ways, it would. Especially when we look at how far GPUs have come in that time - there is a significant leap, and I would expect that, whenever the new consoles do come out, they would be more powerful than whatever exists now in the mainstream PC space. So yeah, there's definitely room to make a big leap.

In other spaces, like the CPU space, I think the trend we've seen in the PC space is maybe a bit of a flattening of the curve over the last few years as opposed to ten years ago, so I expect consoles to reflect that. I think that there are also new, and more interesting questions. I think what we looked to in previous console generations was a very narrow technical view of what represented a console generation. It's 16 bits now - that sort of thing.

What I think we see in the next generation is hopefully a broader view of what a console is and what it brings to the table. We look at things like PSN and Xbox Live, they represent the state of the art today, what can we expect to see in the future? Does it include space for things like free-to-play or connections to social spaces, whatever. Does it change the way that people interact? When we look at the computer/human interaction aspect then we see that Move and Kinect are the state of the art today, what are we doing there in the next generation?

Constraints are our bread and butter. That's what we do, as console developers.

I think there's a lot of new spaces to explore in the console space which will raise more interesting questions.

Yeah - we're taking a broader view of games and consoles, right? It's not just about this very narrow view anymore, now it's about all of these things and how they interact and how that affects game making.

Well, constraints are our bread and butter. That's what we do, as console developers, we've always worked within the constraints of a platform. So in that way it wouldn't be any different if that's what happened, there would be some constraints to that system. Obviously we look at a model like OnLive, which personally I enjoy, I've got their game box in my house, it's obviously different. Clearly there's extra latency, and some games just don't work with that. Unfortunately a lot of the games that don't work with that are on their system, but from a game design point of view, I think a lot of games can adapt.

I think there's also other places to explore in that model. What we're looking at is traditional game development, a game that's supposed to run on a local GPU, pushed on to that platform. The future of that model is that, what if you had access to, not one GPU, but a thousand. Or ten thousand. What kind of experience could you bring to the player? No local machine could ever compete on that level.

I think that there's a lot of space to explore there. I think there's still tons of technological problems that need to be answered to make it a practical method of ever replacing platforms entirely. So, let's see. I'm interested in the question and where things go. I think as game developers, we adapt. Should that be a viable model, and should it provide the advantage then that's where we'll end up going as an industry. I don't feel that, as an industry, we're particularly attached to being in this box.