Xbox or Playstation? The ultimate, seemingly never ending war, may soon come to a halt if you ask Emmet Shear, the boss of the largely successful live streaming site called Twitch. According to him, the Xbox One and the Playstation 4 are most likely going to be the last couple of dedicated gaming consoles made, purely because of their inability to keep up with the pace of new technology.
Shear predicts that in the future, these consoles will turn into simple set-up boxes where they house many different forms of entertainment for the family. “They’re going to have to change form,” he said. “You can already see this on both Xbox and Playstation where there’s a tighter upgrade loop for both the operating systems and the games.”
He also predicts that soon, an update will appear for both of the major consoles, allocating more memory while increasing the speed of each system. After these changes, the market will turn into the mobile phone and tablet market today. Shear believes that fresher iterations of past advancements will come out in shorter time periods to make up for how fast technology can advance.
Even with his doubts about the consoles future, there is no denying that the implementations of the Twitch App on each console have helped skyrocket the number of users on Twitch; “The consoles have been huge for us – they drive a ton of broadcasting.”
Though Shear does remind the audience that most of the top end broadcasting does have to come from PC’s, he acknowledges the fact of how many people were able to get started streaming through their consoles. Shear would like to improve the experience of the console solution for Twitch, but there is only so much that they can do with the limitations of the older platform.
