OnLive: "Do we need boxes anymore?"

OnLive's executive producer Tom Dubois has predicted the death of home consoles, believing that cloud gaming will ultimately replace them.

"It's been a long time since a major console shipped," he told GamesIndustry.biz. "They're all kind of refreshing now, with Kinect and Move and so on. But what are they going to do next?

"We're gonna get another box, but after that, do we need boxes anymore? The bandwidth at homes is gonna be there, the cost of computing continue to decrease..."

Explaining that OnLive's forthcoming Microconsole was fundamentally little more than a video decoder in a small box, he felt that such technology would eventually be built into televisions. "The TV and some sort of controller, and you're good to go."

The producer also disputed claims that most broadband connections were not sufficent for OnLive – going on to demonstrate a prototype of the service on iPad.

While he would not be drawn on a release date, he confirmed that the service could run on 3G.

DuBois also predicted games built specifically for cloud services, rather than the streaming of titles designed with console hardware in mind.

"Game designers have been constrained by the platform and the hardware; if you think about a game designed for the cloud, it's a different exercise.

"You could design a game that ran on multiple servers, used tons of memory, could be 500-person multiplayer... The constraints are removed."

The full interview with Tom DuBois, in which he also discussed the public and industry perception of OnLive and whether there is truth to reports that the company is worth $1.1 billion, is available here.