Last month, Former Square Enix top man Yoichi Wada announced that he would be helming a new company named “Shinra Technologies.” No, they’re not going to try to drain the planet of its life force to use as energy. Yet.
In an interview with Weekly Famitsu, Wada talked about his new company and what they are currently hoping to accomplish. “Since 4 or 5 years ago, we were certain that the next technological breakthrough would be cloud gaming.” Wada explained. “So we began researching the sort of content that could be realised and the sort of game that could have its essence distilled by cloud technology.”
According to Wada, while there has been progress in cloud technology, there hasn’t been what he would call a “breakthrough.” “The game business progresses and evolves through three elements; technology, business models, and content design.” Wada said. “However, there hasn’t been a recent breakthrough on the technology side.”
While cloud gaming offers the potential for people to enjoy playing games on any console through streaming without having to worry about the processing power, Wada believes there is more untapped potential in the technology.
While Wada did not give specific examples on how, he is certain that cloud technology will revolutionise gaming. “This is the age where it’s possible to create explosive hits.” Wada said, bringing up games like Angry Birds or League of Legends as examples. “I feel the idea of releasing low-risk content for already established markets is a 20th century concept.” Wada believes that this is a chance to not just create new revolutionary games, but to create new genres of games.
Asked about the name of the new company, Wada did acknowledge the evil corporation from Final Fantasy VII. “In all seriousness, we wanted [the name] to have a ‘game-like’ image. When thinking in terms of games rather than IT imagery, we used the association with the term ‘cloud’ since the protagonist of Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII is named Cloud.” Wada explained, adding, “Of course, we have nothing to do with the Shinra Company from the game — They’re the bad guys after all.”
Currently, Shinra Technologies is looking to begin service in 2015 with a basic foundation, and build in stages from there. PCs with be the initial target platform, with smart devices coming later.
If all fails, they could probably focus on life-stream energy technology.
ファミ通.com [ファミ通.com]
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Comments
9 responses to “Former Square Enix Honcho Talks About Cloud Gaming’s Future”
Shinra probably didn’t seem evil either……. at first.
This sounds so bril…oh yeah, even PERU is getting better Internet then us shortly. Whelp, there goes our opportunity to join in this revolution.
FFS.
We can’t have fast internet in this country. That’s how the terrorists win.
I hear they can spread Ebola through the fibres. Maybe the Gommerment is looking after us all along!
I heard they spread terrorists through the fiber which is why they keep all your private information now.
Abbott is scanning for Terrorists like trojans. He is really doing you a favour. All hail Hit.. Abbott.
Can Confirm. Have NBN, Got Ebola. That being said, while I may be dead in a short while, it took me 90 minutes to download the 60GB FF13 Steam Release, so… it’s worth it
We took their bins, so now all they have left is the interwebs. I hear they are in league with the cats.
Personally I don’t really see any huge future in cloud-related gaming technology. As the old saying goes, a network is only as fast as the slowest machine so until we have super fast internet in every house in every country, the cloud is going to be pointless for a very large number of people in terms of gaming. The only real direction it could feasibly go is to handle advanced server side calculations for slower transactions like turn-based games or events that aren’t time critical.
I’m interested to see what people can come up with but for the most part it’s going to be a long time before Australians can even consider high-speed cloud based gaming.
All I will say is that if the tech is there and the business case then said companies will push governments for infrastructure.
Most of the market for this in the short term has internet capable just not here in Aus. The further we fall behind the bigger the backlash from Australian voters.
Even if we get better internet we need the customer base to justify local servers to overcome latency issues with Australia being so far away too.