In my youth, I looked forward to days like today, contemplating all the glorious technological breakthroughs that would someday accompany my adolescence. I could bore you with my dreams of pet robots (with a likeness to R.A.L.P.H. from “Spy Kids”) and motorized shoes that would wheel you around effortlessly, but I won’t. Instead, I’m going to tell you about something I never saw coming: the end of video game consoles.

On Jan. 10, current Sony overseer of video game and consumer electronics business Kaz Hirai announced that Sony had no intention of debuting a PlayStation 4 at next year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), where major video game announcements are typically made. Consoles typically have a life span of five years, but Hirai followed this announcement by saying, “I’ve always said a 10-year life cycle for PS3, and there is no reason to go away from that,” according to [The Wall Street Journal](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/01/10/sony-doesnt-plan-to-unveil-a-new-playstation-at-key-trade-show/?mod=WSJBlog).

This isn’t news in and of itself. The PlayStation 3 is six years old as of 2012, and with the way the market is now it easily has four years of juice left in it. The surprising bit of news came the next day from the cloud gaming service Gaikai. Nanea Reeves, chief product officer for Gaikai, made this startling statement according to [Industry Gamers](http://www.industrygamers.com/news/sony-or-microsoft-to-bow-out-of-next-gen-console-race-predicts-gaikai/): “Not all of the current console makers will have one more generation. That will be the big news at E3.”

With these two announcements in mind, what Reeves is insinuating is that console gaming will be a thing of the past by the time Sony and Microsoft are ready to release their next generation. In its place, Reeves believes these companies will run their software through cloud, eliminating any need for a console or tangible games at all.

What this means is not an end to gaming, but gaming as we know it. The cloud is a content sharing vista via streaming. That being said, cloud gaming would be games streamed across the Internet to allow for high-end games to be played on low-end computers. You would likely pay a subscription fee for this service and pay for the ability to have a game streamed to you instead of paying for the actual game.

But is this really in our future? In my most humble opinion, discs are here to stay—at least for a few dozen years. If you’re like me and dread the release of cloud gaming, then I also believe you will be eager to read my reasons for doubting the future. I know the first thing I needed when I read the news of cloud gaming was for someone to tell me why it wasn’t going to happen. So I went researching.

There are a few things you must realize with all these information releases. First, Gaikai wants to convince the gaming population that cloud is a product that you must buy into, for that’s marketing and they want to make profit. By rousing the public and suggesting that the cloud might be the new video game medium, they are publicizing themselves. That being said, they might only be trying to publicize themselves, not present a viable option in gaming.

Here’s a very important second point: About 40 percent of gamers operate without the Internet, and cloud gaming requires a constant, stable Internet connection. If either Sony or Microsoft were to commit to cloud gaming, they would lose about 40 percent of their consumers. This is a blow I doubt either company will want to take.

There has been a lot of backlash among the gaming community for an announcement like this. Gamers like physically owning the games they hash out $60 for instead of trusting data on remote servers that can be lost in a fraction of a second. Further, it’s easy enough to dust off old consoles and play some past favorites, but when cloud gaming goes obsolete or the company goes bankrupt, everything you paid for will probably cease to exist.

Lastly, there is a gaming company today called OnLive that deals with cloud gaming, and considering that service is barely off its feet, I doubt we will be seeing the end of consoles as soon as you think.

My ideal future houses pet robots and motorized shoes. I never once imagined a world in which games were no longer on tangible discs. But the battle between cloud gaming and consoles isn’t over. As technology is progressing, we as gamers have to prepare for the future. If that future contains a system where I have to count on Internet availability and the kindness of the big boys behind it in order to play my games, you’ll find me at Speakers Circle.