Nvidia Corp. recently unveiled a web-site that invites everyone to a special event where its chief executive officer plans to make an important announcement about the future of gaming. The company revealed no details about the upcoming project, but it now turns out that it is a brand new gaming platform.
“Please join me for a very special event on March 3rd,” wrote Jen-Hsun Huang on the Made to Game web-site. “More than 5 years in the making, what I want to share with you will redefine the future of gaming.”
Nvidia’s Made to Game web-site does not contain any clues regarding what exactly Nvidia plans to unveil. However, the source code of the page contains a hidden message, which states that on the 3rd of March the interested people are invited to join Nvidia CEO for an unveiling of “a revolutionary new gaming platform.”
At present it is unknown what exactly Nvidia intends to announce. Many people suggest that this could be a gaming console for the living room, a consumer electronics platform with advanced graphics, a virtual reality platform as well as many other things. One thing that is clear, though: this is not a new graphics card or even graphics processing architecture since “platform” means something bigger than a new GPU.
Strategically, Nvidia clearly needs to think outside of traditional PC gaming world. Moreover, to actually make money on its hardware, which faces competition from different companies, Nvidia needs to offer a unique software stack that will differentiate it from the others by offering unique technologies.
Nvidia, just like many other companies these days, uses social media marketing to attract maximum attention to its events. In a bid to inspire interest and curiosity among gamers as well as to create a buzz across Facebook and Twitter, companies usually describe their upcoming announcements as “revolutionary” or “game changing”. For example, before Nvidia announced its G-Sync, it called it a “ground-breaking” technology that would redefine gaming. While G-Sync is a great feature of GPUs and displays, it has not really changed the world.
Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.
KitGuru Says: At present we are a bit limited with ideas regarding what Nvidia plans to announce. A gaming device for living rooms? A consumer electronics platform with gaming capabilities? A VR headset? Tell us what you think in comments or in social networks!m.”
I’ll bet you right now its a VR platform, probably with G-Sync or something like that, plus Nvidia exclusive bells and whistles.
It’s going to be Nvidia grid. They are going to attempt to make gaming a service based industry, rather than a product based one and when you look at the growing popularity of streaming sites like Netflix and Spotify it makes perfect sense.
nvidia grid has been in open beta for months now though. I use it all the time with my first generation nvidia shield and it works very well
The same for me. But it hasn’t really been open to the public yet. You had to own a shield product for it.
I reckon the announcement will be to open it up to all hardware because you don’t actually need a powerful piece of hardware to run GRID. It would be the first subscription based gaming platform that is open to all.
I’m gonna guess there is going to be mobile G-sync included on top of what is going to be announced
They’re close to releasing that new mobile chip, the X1, which is capable of 1080p at 120Hz, so that would make sense.
The thought of a subscription based gaming service makes me shudder. It means you no longer own a product and consumer protection laws become wildly different. It also means they have full control over the content so should they decide to pull a game, you get no say.
I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve pulled out an old CD or DVD to replay a game. And it’s good to know that I can always do that with what I currently own. A gaming service means you have little choice but to bend over and continually fart out money.
The same reason I never played WoW, but loved GW2.
“Nvidia” and “open” are not two words you often see in the same sentence, but I hope you are right. I’ve tried Onlive and Steam streaming, but neither work brilliantly consistently for me.
I can understand your way of thinking but I do also think that a streaming based service is the way that all media is going. Mainly just for convenience and also for the fact that this would mean that people wouldn’t require high end hardware anymore to play the latest games as all the upgrading would be done on Nvidia/Other platforms side.
It also means that people have access to large game collections instantly which isn’t something that has ever been possible for due to the large set-up cost of getting a gaming machine and then buying individual games at a high price.
I also think that it makes monetization of games easier for the developers as they will receive a fixed amount of money for every time their game is played.
I personally understand why people don’t want this to happen but I think that the industry will move to this regardless, due to convenience to the consumer as well as the industry.
Open is in slightly different context here to say an open source project (which I would totally agree with you on).
Open in this context would mean that the Nvidia platform (sort of like steam as a platform) would be an account and wouldn’t be about selling hardware so the hardware you have wouldn’t limit whether you could join the nvidia platform. This opens up their service to the mobile industry allowing the millions of “casual”/”mobile” gamers to access their service rather than just the people who have an nvidia product.
Benefits will probably come with having an Nvidia product e.g. 12 months free subscription (as seen with amazon and their firephone)
Its going to be the new X1 SoC based Shield tablet.
Im sure they will redefine the future of gaming with just 3.5gb of memory… 😀