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Plex launches a subscription-based retro game streaming service, ‘Plex Arcade’
Plex, the media software maker that’s expanded into streaming in recent years, is adding to its service once again with today’s launch of game streaming. Unlike other game streaming efforts from companies like Microsoft or Google, the new “Plex Arcade” isn’t focused on top gaming titles and new releases, but rather on retro games. At launch, the service is offering around 30 games, including titles like Asteroids, Centipede, Missile Command, Adventure and Ninja Golf.
The game streaming service was spun out of Plex’s in-house incubator, Plex Labs, and represents more of a passion project for the company, rather than some larger shift in direction, we’re told. The technology to make it available was already 95% built, so the team decided to put together the game streaming service as a surprise for users, as well as a way to expand Plex’s core mission of becoming a broader entertainment platform.
The company says it actually kicked around the idea of adding games to Plex for years, but over the course of 2020 in particular, the team was drawn to the idea even more out of personal interest and a need for a distraction.
Image Credits: Plex
The game service was built with the help of new partner Parsec and its underlying, low-latency streaming technology, Plex says. This made it possible to bring fully playable game libraries to Plex.
To build the game library, Plex partnered with Atari to license a catalog of classic titles.
At launch, the full list of games include: 3D Tic-Tac-Toe, Adventure, Alien Brigade, Aquaventure, Asteroids, Avalanche, Basketbrawl, Centipede, Combat, Dark Chambers, Desert Falcon, Fatal Run, Food Fight (Charley Chuck’s), Gravitar, Haunted House, Human Cannonball, Lunar Battle, Lunar Lander, Major Havoc, Millipede, Missile Command, Motor Psycho, Ninja Golf, Outlaw, Planet Smashers, Radar Lock, Sky Diver, Sky Raider, Solaris and Super Breakout.
Due to the partnership and licensing fees involved with the project, Plex Arcade will not be a free addition.
Instead, it will be offered as a separate subscription for $2.99 per month for existing Plex Pass subscribers (Plex’s existing $4.99/mo plan). For nonsubscribers, Plex Arcade is $4.99 per month. A free, 7-day trial is also available.
Plex Arcade’s server will require either a Windows or Mac to run (due to Parsec’s limitations), which means it won’t work on Linux, NAS devices or NVIDIA Shield. Gameplay, meanwhile, is restricted to iOS, Android (mobile or TV), tvOS and the Chrome web browser.
It will also support Bluetooth and USB game controllers that are compatible with your device, or you can use a keyboard for Chrome-based gaming. Plex recommends the Sony DualShock 4 or Xbox One controller for the best results.
Image Credits: Plex
The company is taking a wait-and-see approach to expanding the service over time. If it demonstrates interest and traction in the form of subscriptions, Plex may consider growing it further.
Plex Arcade is the latest addition to what’s now a growing lineup of entertainment options for Plex users.
Over the past several years, the media software company has moved beyond being a tool to organize home media collections to also allow users to do things like stream live TV from an antenna or via the web, listen to music and podcasts, watch ad-supported movies and TV, watch the news and more.
These efforts are slowly paying off in terms of user growth. In 2017, Plex had 10 million registered users. A couple of years later, it had 15 million. Today, Plex says it has 25 million users.
Plex Arcade is available as of today.
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Microsoft kills Mixer, will push users to Facebook Gaming
Microsoft is killing its Twitch competitor Mixer next month and is partnering with Facebook to push its users toward the Facebook Gaming service.
The app is winding down on July 22. The sudden move comes after Microsoft has dumped considerable efforts into its gaming-centric streaming service, acquiring streaming rights to some of the biggest esports personalities like Ninja and Shroud. Microsoft couldn’t spend its way into meaningfully competition with Amazon’s Twitch and Alphabet’s YouTube Gaming.
The company launched its Mixer service in 2017 after acquiring the gaming startup Beam Interactive in 2016.
Microsoft announced that when the service sunsets, it will be transitioning partnerships to Facebook Gaming and redirecting its users to the service as well. The partnership between the two is a T-Mobile and Sprint partnership of sorts, as the two were clearly trailing far behind the YouTube Gaming/Twitch duopoly. The Facebook partnership goes deeper than just watching streams; Microsoft will integrate their xCloud game-streaming service into Facebook Gaming so users can quickly play titles that they see inside the service.
According to an interview in The Verge, top streamers like Ninja won’t be forced to migrate to Facebook Gaming and will be able to rejoin Twitch if they choose. Microsoft’s gaming chief Phil Spencer pinned the shutdown on the service’s inability to catch up with competitors:
We started pretty far behind, in terms of where Mixer’s monthly active viewers were compared to some of the big players out there,” says Phil Spencer, Microsoft’s head of gaming, in an interview with The Verge. “I think the Mixer community is really going to benefit from the broad audience that Facebook has through their properties, and the abilities to reach gamers in a very seamless way through the social platform Facebook has.
According to data from SensorTower, year-to-date downloads of the app on the App Store and Google Play were down 23% in 2020 compared to the same period of 2019, with the app seeing 3.4 million downloads this year. The company says their data shows that the app has been installed about 21 million times in total.
The announcement came in the midst of Apple’s WWDC keynote, so fair to say that Microsoft was likely aiming to minimize attention on this high-profile shutdown.
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Google Stadia is now free for everyone, with a two-month trial for Pro tier
Google’s game-streaming service Stadia is now free for anyone with a Gmail account, the company announced today. Assuming you’ve got a compatible device and controller — and good internet in one of the 14 supported countries — you can sign up right now and get the “Pro” edition with a handful of built-in games for two months.
Until today, Stadia was only available via a $129 “Premiere Edition” that came with a controller, though a free “Base” version has been long promised. In a blog post, the company explained that the intense pressures of the pandemic led them to finally open up the service.
“We’re facing some of the most challenging times in recent memory. Video games can be a valuable way to socialize with friends and family when you’re stuck at home, so we’re giving gamers in 14 countries free access to Stadia for two months,” writes Stadia VP and GM Phil Harrison.
Although the post makes no mention of a permanent free Base tier, a Google representative confirmed that it exists and players signing up today will be able to switch to it if they decide not to pay for Pro after two months. It’s limited to 1080p, 60 frames per second, and stereo (versus surround) sound.
Existing subscribers, who have been vocally critical of the bare-bones nature of the service they paid a premium to access, will not be charged for the next two months. Also, in order to cope with what will no doubt be a flood of demand, Stadia will be defaulting everyone’s streams to 1080p, though you’ll be able to change that in your preferences. That’s interesting, considering YouTube just downgraded its quality worldwide to lower overall bandwidth usage.
For now, though, it won’t do to look a gift horse in the mouth. Stadia is a solid way to play games on a PC, or TV or device that would normally not be able to do so — an underpowered laptop, for instance. Streaming to your phone or tablet is also an option.
On supported Android devices you’ll need to download the app; on computers, you’ll need Chrome; and for a TV you need a Chromecast Ultra — the regular one won’t cut it. You can’t play games on iOS yet, unfortunately.
You have to provide your own controller if you’re not using a keyboard and mouse; a list of compatible ones (and phones) is available here, and while Google’s own Stadia controller is the only one that works with Chromecast, the controllers for the other major consoles generally work for Chrome and Android phones.
As for games, well, that part’s a bit confusing. You’ll be getting access to the Stadia Pro tier of membership, which gets at least free game every month to keep, like Xbox Games with Gold and PlayStation Plus. Right now, though, that only amounts to nine titles, though some are pretty great — Destiny 2, SteamWorld Dig 2, GRID and a few more.
On either a Pro or free account, if you want to play other games like Borderlands 3 or Rise of the Tomb Raider, you’ll have to buy them on the Stadia marketplace. The games are then only available to stream through Stadia, not to run natively on your PC, so if you ever left the service you would lose access to them (a “license not buy” situation common on digital platforms, but especially pronounced on streaming ones). There are 38 games available to buy total, and yes, that number is pretty low. Google is “tracking” 120 more to arrive this year, but the lack of games has been a serious issue for existing subscribers.
So far Stadia has yet to prove itself a worthwhile investment for gamers, though for some obviously it’s a dream come true. SensorTower put downloads of the app at about 750,000, which is nothing to sniff at — but it’s far from the number of installations of popular games services like Steam.
That said, free trial will help potential subscribers decide if the service is for them, with zero risk. You can sign up for your free trial via the main Stadia site here; the company has said it is in the middle of rolling out the feature, so check back if it isn’t there yet.
And here are the countries in which it is currently available:
- United States
- Canada
- United Kingdom
- Ireland
- France
- Germany
- Italy
- Spain
- Netherlands
- Belgium
- Denmark
- Sweden
- Norway
- Finland
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Microsoft’s game streaming service Project xCloud launches in preview on iOS
Last year, Microsoft launched a preview of Project xCloud, its ambitious game streaming service that aims to deliver games to any screen — console, PC or mobile. However, the service until now has only been available to mobile users on Android. Today, that changes as Microsoft is bringing the Project xCloud preview to iOS devices by way of Apple’s TestFlight program.
Microsoft had been testing xCloud on iOS internally, but had yet to open it up to the public.
Unfortunately, the iOS test will be limited. As is standard with Apple’s TestFlight platform, the new build will be limited to only 10,000 testers.
That won’t likely be enough spots to meet demand, Microsoft admits, and says invitations will be distributed on a first-come, first-serve basis. To work around the limitation, Microsoft plans to boot out some early testers to make room for new testers during the course of the public beta.
“Those who are accepted into the iOS TestFlight preview may not necessarily participate for the full duration of the preview,” the company explains via blog post. “As noted earlier, there are limited spaces available, so for testing purposes we may need to cycle through registrants in order to best utilize the available testing audience. This also means that even if you miss out on the initial allocation, you might receive an invitation to participate later in the preview,” it says.
The iOS preview will also be limited to only one game: “Halo: The Master Chief Collection.” In addition, this particular test won’t include the preview of Xbox Console Streaming as the Android test currently does.
To qualify, testers will need a Microsoft account associated with their Xbox gamertag; an iPhone or iPad running iOS 13.0 or higher and Bluetooth v. 4.0; a Bluetooth-enabled Xbox Once Wireless Controller; access to Wi-Fi or a mobile data connection that supports 10 Mbps-down bandwidth; and, optionally, a third-party controller mount for phone-based games (like this one).
The move to bring console-quality games to smartphones represents a shift in Microsoft’s gaming strategy. The company understands that it can only sell so many consoles, for starters, but mobile phones are everywhere. In addition, people today want to play games on any available screen — not just the big TV screen at home. And for some users, mobile is their only screen.
Meanwhile, cross-platform gaming is becoming increasingly popular, thanks to titles like Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, PUBG and others, which proved that mobile experiences can match consoles.
Project xCloud aims to make it easier for developers to build games that work everywhere. This is no small task, as it required Microsoft to architect a new customizable blade that hosts the component parts of multiple Xbox One consoles, as well as the associated infrastructure needed to support it. It also needs to ensure the technology can deliver games at console speeds with low latency, so mobile users don’t feel like they’re getting a second-rate experience.
Instructions on how to join the TestFlight are available here.
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Twitch’s loss of top streamers impacts hours watched and streamed in Q4 2019, report says
The loss of several big-name streamers is finally taking its toll on Twitch, according to a new report from StreamLabs and Newzoo out today. In August 2019, top streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, announced his intention to leave Twitch for Microsoft Mixer. Several others have since defected as well, including competitive gamer Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek, who went to Mixer in October, Jack “CouRage” Dunlop, who left in November for YouTube Live, and Jeremy “Disguised Toast” Wang, who also left in November, but went to Facebook Gaming.
The loss of Ninja hadn’t impacted the amount of time Twitch users spent watching content on the platform as of Q3 2019, but the total hours streamed had slightly dipped. As of Q4 2019, however, Twitch’s momentum began to slow.
While the Amazon-owned streaming site is still by far the leader in terms of hours of content both watched and streamed compared with rivals, with a market share of 75.1%, the number of hours watched on Twitch declined from Q3 to Q4 2019 by 9.8%.
This resulted in the lowest number of hours watched on the platform (2,299.6 million) since Q3 2018 (2,283.9 million).
That being said, Twitch overall is still growing, with a 12% increase in total hours watched on the platform in 2019 compared with 2018.
The high-profile losses are also now impacting the hours streamed on Twitch, the report found.
The platform in Q4 2019 saw the lowest number of hours streamed (82.7 million) since Q2 2018 (86 million). Again, the trend on a year-over-year basis is still climbing upwards, with a 16.1% increase in total hours streamed in 2019 versus 2018.
Twitch saw declines in the number of unique channels streaming over the course of 2019, too, dropping from 5.6 million in Q1 2019 — the highest ever — to 3.7 million by Q4.
Concurrent viewers declined on a quarterly basis by 9.4%. This is the lowest average concurrent viewership figure since Q3 2018. On an annual basis, however, concurrent viewership was still up by 12.3%. The average number of viewers per channel was stable and has increased by 12.5% since Q1 2018.
YouTube Gaming Live, meanwhile, became the only platform to see increases in hours watched, streamed and concurrent viewership in Q4 2019.
CourageJD’s move to YouTube Gaming Live has helped to boost Google’s platform, but the increases can also be attributed to YouTube’s broadcast of top esports events and influencer moments.
The total number of hours watched on YouTube Gaming Live grew 46% from Q1 to Q4 2019 to reach 909.1 million — making that the largest percentage increase among gaming sites. Hours streamed remained stable, closing the year at 12.3 million. Unique channels increased 4.8% on a quarterly basis, but declined 24.6% from Q1 2019.
YouTube Gaming Live’s biggest jump was in concurrent viewers, which grew by a sizable 33.8% in Q4 — making it the only platform to see an increase in average concurrent viewership in the quarter. Average viewers per channel also increased by 21% quarter-over-quarter — even though the number of unique streaming channels grew by 4.8%, which usually means a drop in average viewers per channel would occur.
YouTube Gaming Live closed the year with 22.1% market share.
Ninja’s move to Mixer has encouraged other streamers to start broadcasting on the platform, but despite that deal and the one with Shroud, the number of hours watched declined 8.5% quarter-over-quarter, from 90.2 million in Q3 2019 to 82.5 million in Q4 2019. But year-over-year, Mixer’s hours watched have more than doubled.
Ninja and Shroud have helped boost the number of hours streamed on Mixer, more than doubling the number of hours in Q3. But in Q4, the number of hours streamed dropped 12.9%, from 32.6 million to 28.4 million.
However, 80.3 million hours of content was streamed in 2019 versus just 35.2 million hours in 2018.
There also was a 7.5% decrease in the number of Mixer channels in Q4 (3.9 million to 3.6 million), but a 78% increased in 2019 compared with 2018. Mixer now has triple the number of unique channels streaming, compared with YouTube Gaming Live.
Average concurrent viewership on Mixer declined 8% from Q3 to Q4, but was up 55.1% year-over-year. Average viewers per channel remained stable.
Mixer closed the year with a 2.7% market share.
The report doesn’t include Facebook Gaming live streaming data. But it does note there was a 400% increase in the number of live streams in 2019, from 504,173 live streams in Q1 to 2,525,863 in Q4, based on Facebook Gaming streamers who used the Streamlabs’ OBS product. Additionally, the number of total hours streamed increased by 275%, from 438,835 in Q1 to 1,648,557 in Q4.
Also in Q4, several live streamers made the switch to Facebook, including Disguised Toast, as noted above, as well as Zero and Corinna Kopf. This also could have contributed to the momentum in the quarter, as well as launches of charity live streaming tools, and the arrival of the Facebook Gaming app in Thailand and Latin America.
For the year, the most-watched publisher was Riot Games, due to League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics. Epic Games (Fortnite) trailed by only 25.1 million hours. The latter saw a 29% decline, year-over-year, in terms of hours watched, while the former grew just 3.6%.
Similarly, League of Legends was the No. 1 game streamed on Twitch in 2019, followed by Fornite then Grand Theft Auto V. Fornite topped YouTube Gaming Live and Mixer.
While none of the streamers’ defections from Twitch have been significant enough to force the platform from its No. 1 position, it has created a healthier competitive landscape among streaming services. But in reality, it’s still too soon to see what long-term impacts the moves will have on Twitch and whether or not its rivals can continue their momentum in 2020.
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Microsoft announces its xCloud streaming service and a truckload of new games are coming in 2020
Microsoft has announced a vague intention to launch its xCloud game streaming service sometime in 2020, and dropped a double handful of new titles that will arrive on it and the existing Game Pass subscription. It seems that next year will indeed be the opening battle in the streaming wars to come.
The announcements came at XO19, the company’s Xbox-focused event, which is taking place in London. They seem calculated to take the wind out of Google’s sails; the opening lineup of Stadia, Google’s entry in the game streaming world, was finalized earlier this week and is rather bare bones. Microsoft is hoping Google’s first-mover advantage will be nullified by the expected confusion around payments, features, titles and other issues Stadia is still working out.
Game Pass is currently in a preview period on PC. Although Microsoft did not supply a hard release date, saying only that 2020 is the plan. That year will also bring Windows 10 support, PC game streaming and potentially an expansion beyond Android for mobile streaming.
The price, too, is TBA — Google’s proposition is remarkably complicated, and it will take time for consumers to figure out what they’re willing to pay for, what the real costs are, and so on. So Microsoft is probably going to wait and see here.
But what is known about xCloud is that gamers will get access to all the games currently available on Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription — well over a hundred PC and console titles right now, with more being added regularly. That makes it easier to commit to for a lot of gamers.
New controllers will be supported soon, including Sony’s DualShock 4, which comes with the PlayStation 4; that’s a real olive branch to Microsoft’s arch-rival. And new countries will be brought into the fold soon, as well: Canada, India, Japan and “Western Europe.”
Game Pass will also be receiving dozens of titles old and new throughout 2020, including Final Fantasy 7 through 15, Darksiders 3, Flight Simulator and a bunch of newly announced games such as Obsidian’s new “Honey, I Shrunk the Survival Game” title, “Grounded.”
Several brand new properties and gameplay for known but unreleased games were also teased at XO19. Check them out below:
Everwild is a new IP from Rare that appears to involve a lot of sneaking around a lush forest and either avoiding or interacting with fantastical animals. It’s still early days, but the team wants to create “new ways to play in a natural and magical world.” I’m just here for the solar-powered dino-deer.
Tell Me Why is a new one from Dontnod, makers of Life Is Strange starring a pair of twins with some kind of paranormal connection. Notably one of the twins is transgender, not common among game protagonists, and the company worked with GLAAD to make sure the representation of the character is genuine.
Age of Empires IV got an only slightly satisfying gameplay reveal. Real-time strategy buffs will want more than this, but no doubt they’re excited to see this venerable franchise getting a modern sequel.
You can catch up on the rest over at the Xbox official blog post.
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Virtual reality game-streaming platform Vreal shuts down
Vreal, an ambitious game-streaming platform that aimed to let VR users explore the worlds that live-streamers were playing in, is shutting down and laying off its staff after raising $15 million in venture capital. The startup announced the shutdown on its website’s homepage.
The Seattle startup raised cash from investors including Axioma Ventures, Upfront Ventures and Intel Capital. Vreal raised an $11.7 million Series A in early 2018.
Vreal’s tech let game streamers share the entire 3D environment of the VR world they were inside, something which allowed users to walk around streamers as avatars or explore on their own as passive observers while listening to the live-streamer blast their way through zombies.
The startup, which was founded in 2015, spent VR’s most hyped years building out their live-streaming tech. By the time they closed their Series A early last year, their platform was still in the pre-alpha launch stage. The platform launched in Early Access on Steam a few months later in June.
“Unfortunately, the VR market never developed as quickly as we all had hoped, and we were definitely ahead of our time. As a result, Vreal is shutting down operations and our wonderful team members are moving on to other opportunities,” a blog post titled “Moving on to new realities…” on the company’s hollowed-out website now reads.
As I noted after the Series A announcement, the Vreal platform was “a product for a pretty tight niche: streamers with VR hardware broadcasting for viewers with VR hardware.” The company’s religious allegiance to VR hardware being the only way to enjoy and produce the content likely limited the platform’s reach too much. Two months ago, the company announced it was adding an experimental web browser view to its platform to expand its reach, but that move seems to have been too little, too late.
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Ninja is leaving Twitch for Microsoft’s Mixer
Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, the biggest streamer ever, has today announced his intention to leave the Twitch platform in favor of Microsoft’s Mixer.
Twitch is far and away the biggest video game streaming platform on the internet, claiming 72% of all hours watched, according to StreamElements. Mixer, by comparison, owns 3%, which is approximately 112 million viewership hours this most recent quarter.
Mixer is owned by Microsoft following an acquisition in 2016, back when Mixer was called Beam. Interestingly enough, Beam won the Disrupt NY Battlefield competition in 2016.
Twitch offered this statement to the Verge:
We’ve loved watching Ninja on Twitch over the years and are proud of all that he’s accomplished for himself and his family, and the gaming community. We wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors.
Surprisingly quickly, Twitch took away Ninja’s “Partnered” check mark, the Twitch equivalent of a verified blue tick.
Damn they snagged this mans checkmark QUICK pic.twitter.com/Br62NB8uX5
— 100T Mako
(@Mako) August 1, 2019
Ninja announced the news via video:
The announcement is very light on reasons why Ninja might have moved from his longtime home at Twitch over to Microsoft. It’s possible (and likely?) that Mixer offered the streaming star an enormous amount of money to make the move, which could signal the beginning of a new wave of payouts for mega streaming stars — not unlike the current NBA free agency bonanza, which has seen the migration of superstars to marquee franchises in order to form basketball equivalents of supergroups.
It’s also worth wondering who reigns supreme in this equation: players or platforms? Luckily, we’ll find out quickly as the video game streaming space sees its biggest talent shakeup since the industry’s inception.
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Twitch continues to dominate live streaming with its second-biggest quarter to date
Twitch continues to lead rivals including, YouTube Live, Facebook Gaming and Microsoft’s Mixer, when it comes to live-streaming video. Despite experiencing its first decline in hours watched in Q2 2019, the Amazon-owned game-streaming site still had its second-biggest quarter to date, with more than 70% of the hours watched during the quarter.
According to a new report from StreamElements, Twitch viewers live-streamed a total of 2.72+ billion hours in Q2 — or 72.2% of all live hours watched — compared with 735.54 million hours on YouTube Live (19.5%), 197.76 million on Facebook Gaming (5.3%) and just 112.29 million hours (3%) on Mixer.
Combined, the total hours watched across all four platforms was 3.77 billion in Q2.
While none of Twitch’s rivals are nearly catching up, YouTube Live did have a good month in May, breaking its own record with 284 million hours watched. Overall, YouTube Live’s hours watched improved in Q2 as a result, while Twitch saw a slight decline.
Facebook Gaming is also gaining steam. It’s now the third-biggest live-streaming platform, having passed Microsoft Mixer.
Despite its traction, Twitch doesn’t have much of a long tail when it comes to stream viewership. That’s a problem it has faced for some time, as newcomers complained they spent years broadcasting to no one in hopes of gaining a fan base, with little success. Twitch has tried to remedy this problem with various educational efforts as well as product features like Raids and Squad Streams, for example.
However, the new report finds that the majority (almost 75%) of Twitch’s viewership still comes from people tuning in to the top 5,000 channels. Out of the 2.7 billion hours watched in Q2, these top 5,000 channels drove 2 billion of those hours watched.
In addition, the average concurrent viewership (viewers watching at the same time) of the top 5,000 channels increased by 12% in Q2 2019, compared with Q1. The top 200 channels have the highest concurrent viewership with 10,590 people watching together, on average.
Also in the quarter, viewership of top titles like Fortnite, League of Legends, Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive declined, while vlogging — aka “Just Chatting” — grew, along with other titles.
Esports, meanwhile, still draws big numbers, but represents only a small slice of the overall pie.
The full report, which takes a look at other trends, including which streamers are gaining and losing popularity, is available here.
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Nintendo: we’re ‘evaluating’ streaming
Game streaming loomed large as the biggest story of E3. Between Google’s Stadia news late last week, Microsoft’s Game Pass additions, a Ubisoft announcement and even the presence of Netflix, the writing is clearly on the wall.
Nintendo, of course, has largely been absent from that conversation. No real surprise, really. The gaming company has always marched to the beat of its own drum, bucking larger industry trends in favor of its own singular vision. The approach has sometimes been to its detriment (as is the case with its longtime heel-dragging on mobile), but has largely resulted in a number of the industry’s most beloved platforms, titles and IP.
Given the company’s rich and storied gaming history, a Netflix-style approach to content makes a lot of sense for a company like Nintendo. And certainly, the notion of paying $10 a month for access to 30 years of Mario, Zelda and the like doesn’t seem like much of a stretch. Though for Nintendo, much of the calculation no doubt comes down to whether or not gamers are willing to continue to pay for downloads.
In an interview with TechCrunch this week on the show floor, Nintendo of America executive Charlie Scibetta said the concept is one the company has been considering. “Streaming is certainly interesting technology,” he told TechCrunch. “Nintendo is keeping a close eye on it and we’re evaluating it. We don’t have anything to announce right now in terms of adopting that technology. For us, it’s still physical and it’s digital downloads through our eShop.”
The sentiment echos similar statements made by new Nintendo of America chief Doug Bowser, who told The Hollywood Reporter, “We’re always interested in how various new technologies can enable different ways to play games.”
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