Having spoken to John Carmack, IndustryGamers knows that he's an outspoken man of strong opinions. Speaking to Polish site CD-Action [thanks Digital Foundry], he talked about the future of consoles, and how the next generation might be download only.
"I have a good sense of where technology is going but larger things about what businesses choose to do and big businesses like Microsoft and Sony... those are decisions above my pay grade and not really in my line of business, or what I think about a lot," said Carmack. "I think that Xbox Live... the advent of that and the App Store with the iPhone are wonderful signs of the future of digital distribution. I think there's a decent chance that one of the next gen consoles will be without optical media... the uptake rates of people who have broadband connects surprised everyone this generation. It's higher than what the core publishers and even the first party people expected."
Carmack also addressed the 'when' question for the next generation of consoles, saying that Sony might try to avoid being stung by a late release compared to the competition, like it was with this generation. "The whole jockeying for who's going to release the first next gen console is very interesting and pretty divorced from the technical side of things," noted Carmack. "Whether Sony wants to jump the gun to prevent the same sort of 360 lag from happening to them again seems likely. As developers, we would really like to see this generation stretch as long as possible. We'd like to see it be quite a few more years before the next gen console comes out, but I suspect one will end up shipping something earlier rather than later."
While questions about the next generation of consoles still hang in the air for everyone, Carmack thinks that cloud computing could possibly turn everything on its ear.
"There'll be questions of whether we shift to a cloud computing infrastructure... lots of interesting questions about whether you have the computing power in your living room versus somewhere else," Carmack mused. "Certainly the easier aspect of that is 'net as storage' where it's all digital distribution and you could wind up doing an idTech 5-like thing... and blow it up to World of Warcraft size so you need a hundred petabytes of storage in your central game system. We can do that now! It's not an absurd thing to talk about. Games are already in the tens of millions of dollars in terms of budget size and that's probably going to continue to climb there. The idea of putting millions of dollars into higher-sized storage... it's not unreasonable to at least consider."
