Yesterday's Future

Here's the curious thing. Five years ago, you could be guaranteed that even if CES didn't give you any major gaming announcements, it would point to a really solid direction for gaming in future. The development of videogames went hand in hand with the development of consumer electronics for so long that CES became a clear roadsign for the way that games would develop over the coming year or two. Technology on the show floor today would be technology in the living room in 12 months, and games would be there to showcase it.

Today, that doesn't feel right at all. In some respects, that's because the box-shifter companies seem like they're foundering about in search of a direction at present. In televisions, 3D has faltered, and seems doomed to several more years in the wilderness (at least) as competing technologies of varying quality and expense wage a scrappy battle that pours cold water on what little consumer enthusiasm actually exists. In mobile technology, Microsoft is the only company to have recovered enough from the iPhone shock of five years ago to be able to offer any kind of competing vision, and even that is innovation of the human interface variety, rather than any shake-up of hardware or business model. If you're looking for the future of interactive entertainment, nothing at CES was exactly inspiring.

We should be looking to games for the future of consumer electronics, because it's in the gaming space that most of the interesting innovation and experimentation is happening

But the reason for that is simple - it's because CES is now the wrong place to look for the future of games. Rather, we should be looking to games for the future of consumer electronics, because it's in the gaming space that most of the interesting innovation and experimentation is happening right now.

Televisions with motion and speech controlled menus? Microsoft has already got 8-figure sales for Kinect, a device that does precisely that. Entertainment being delivered directly to consumer devices from a wide variety of content creators? That's effectively what the game development industry has turned Apple's App Store into. While representatives at CES were blathering about blue-sky visions for the future of content delivery, Gaikai was getting ready to show off a real, live service where you click a button on Facebook and immediately play World of Warcraft. Even Nintendo, a company often wrongfully disregarded in the annals of technological innovation, can now lay claim to having the world's most successful consumer 3D device.

I often wonder if, working within the boundaries of the games business, we find it too easy to take this kind of stuff for granted. A show like CES really brings home the extent to which services and technologies already offered by brands like Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo are still being seen as a far-flung future by large swathes of the tech industry. Even companies like Apple and Facebook, not in themselves games firms, have seen their development in the past half-decade hugely influenced by the needs and innovations of videogames. The App Store would not be where it is today were it not for games. Nor, for that matter, would Facebook.

What's particularly fascinating is to consider what all of these innovations and developments - in which videogames have truly led the consumer electronics and entertainment industries - have in common. The answer is that, for the most part, they're not founded on high-cost technological innovation. Even Kinect (a product whose success I couch in slightly skeptical terms, because I'm not sure it's quite had its moment just yet) is fundamentally a disruptive technology which combines existing components with very, very clever software. The rest of these innovations are in software, services and business models. They take the technology that we've got now and turn them into something that consumers want, and often, something that ends up radically changing consumer behaviours.

That's something that's very important to bear in mind in light of the still-ongoing discussions about how long this console generation will endure and whether we're going to see new platforms by the end of 2012. The underlying hardware of consoles may not have changed in the past five years, but they have been the most active and exciting years ever for videogames. If anything, the consoles are the most slowly developing area of the market. New GPUs and more RAM will happen inevitably, down the line - but this is an industry powered not by new chips but by new ideas, and the future will be measured not in polygon throughput but in the implementation and adoption of fresh concepts. From that standpoint, CES has never seemed more irrelevant - and the games business has never felt further ahead of rival industries.