There's been plenty of talk of consoles being "in trouble" lately and that the console market will start losing revenues to cloud gaming. Leading retailer GameStop, however, remains confident that consoles will be around for quite some time.
Speaking during CES, GameStop CEO Paul Raines commented, "We bought this technology company called Spawn Labs and we're doing some very interesting things. We can stream console games right now - the technology works great. Now we're in the process of the commercial agreements. How do we merchandise it and go to market? There's no question to us that streaming will play a role in this industry, but it will not replace console gaming. I think that's sort of the old way of thinking about that."
He continued, "What streaming does is it augments and it takes your console experience to a non-console space, whether at the office, travel, etc."
As GameStop President Tony Bartel told us last year, GameStop believes it has an advantage over Gaikai or OnLive with Spawn Labs because it can learn about its customer base from its PowerUp Rewards system and cater to consumers that way.
"Spawn Labs has allowed us to really start from the ground up and totally develop our PowerUp Rewards system. We know exactly what games people have and which games they are going to be playing. We know exactly where they live. We know what the demand is, and we know who is going to be playing those games," Bartel noted. "With our reservation system, which is also tied in to PowerUp Rewards, we will have great information in terms of who is going to be most likely to play games and where that’s going to take place. That will allow us to really invest behind demand. We will be able to see demand. We’ll be able to scale accordingly. That’s where we have an advantage over our competition because we know who has reserved a game for the big launches."
