The Great Game In The Sky

Like music and movies before it, the video game industry confronts streaming and business model disruption.

- Chris Morris

IN THE BEGINNING, there were video game stores. There were bricks, and there was mortar, and hours before the stroke of midnight of a highly anticipated release, there were snaking lines of customers outside GameStop or Toys “R” Us or Best Buy, waiting with excitement for the sale to begin. This was the first age of video games, and it was good.

And then broadband Internet service began creeping across the nation. Game publishers began experimenting with a different model, allowing people to download titles directly to their gaming systems. There were issues. Servers were overloaded when a big game would drop. Gamers became angry when publishers revoked licenses to the games the players thought they owned. But both sides adapted, Toys “R” Us vanished, and GameStop started searching for a buyer. This was the second age of video games, and it, too, was (mostly) good.

And then Daniel Ek and Reed Hastings said, Let there be streaming. And gaming companies, keen on the success of Spotify and Netflix and their peers, began exploring how to use cloud-computing technology to deliver games instantly and on demand to players. This is the third age of video games, and some believe it could be the best of them all.